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IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

BEING THE VACATION THOUGHTS 
OF A SCHOOLMISTRESS 



BY 
MARY TAYLOR BLAUVELT 

Author of " The Development of Cabinet 
Government in England " 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1911 



^'^:<^ 






Copyright, 1911 
Sherman, French <&«• Company 



©CI.A300328 



TO 

NEENA, CLAIRE AND KATHARINE 

FRIENDS WHO HAVE 
"HELPED ME TO GOOD THOUGHTS" 



' ' Love is the white heat fusion of 
the intellect, sensibility and will" 

ANNA EUGENIA MORGAN 
Late Professor of Moral Philosophy 
in Wellesley College 

' ' Love is the fulfilment of the law' ' 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I In Cambridge Backs 1 

II Friendship ....... 6 

III The New School Mistress ... 28 

IV The Artist . . . . . . .51 

V The Artistic Temperament . . 76 

VI On the Criticism of Others . . 98 

VII The First Great Commandment . 119 

VIII Immortauty 143 

IX On the Writing of History . . 168 



IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

It is by the waters of the Cam, in Cambridge, 
England, that I write. I am an American teacher, 
and I came over here this summer in the hope of 
being able to do some research work in English 
libraries. Scarcely had I landed when I was 
taken ill, so that considerable time had to be spent 
in a nursing home. Now that I am better, but 
still unable to do serious work, I sit a great deal 
in the college backs, lose myself in the beauty of 
my surroundings, and in my own thoughts. And 
since I have had to give up the work which I had 
planned, it comforts me to put down on paper 
some of the things which I have thought about. 

Physical infirmity seems to me an ill chiefly be- 
cause it prevents work. But on the other hand 
it is a great blessing in that it brings out human 
kindness ; in fact the trouble seems to dwindle into 
nothing, and leave only the loving-kindness. My 
English friends have been most devoted in their 
attentions to me, and every American mail- 
steamer brings loving messages from dear ones 
far away. And although my long-cherished 
plans for work have been frustrated, I am sur- 
prised to find that I am not unhappy. On the 



9, IN CAjNIBRIDGE BACKS 

contrary I spend my time in pleasant thinking, 
thinking which seems to me ahnost as profitable 
as the work would have been. After all, when we 
do our part we never really fail ; we only succeed 
in a different way from that in which we intended. 
In Great St. Mary's church here there are some 
prayer-stools on which are the words, "Think and 
Thank." I like the combination of injunctions. 
For I am more and more convinced that when we 
truly think, that is when the mind is making ac- 
tual progress, it is impossible not to be both happy 
and thankful. And perhaps physical disability 
is sometimes sent to us in order that we may take 
time to think and thank, in order that the soul 
may have a prolonged sabbath. For some of us 
who make a business of accumulating knowledge 
might get to be mere crams if seasons were not 
sent to us in which it is impossible to learn more 
facts, but in which we may feel and assimilate 
those which we already know, and thus translate 
our knowledge into wisdom. The story is told of 
St. Catherine of Genoa that just before her con- 
version she prayed, "St. Benedict, pray to God 
for me that He may make me stay three months 
sick in bed." Was it that she felt the need of a 
period of enforced idleness, that she might rest be- 
side still waters as I am resting this summer? I 
like to remember that our word school is derived 
from the word Greek word axoXrj — leisure. But 
when the Greek spoke of axok:j he did not mean 
idleness, but rather that absorption of the mind in 



IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 3 

high thinking which makes us feel that these lives 
of ours, however petty and sordid they may seem 
at times, are still worth living because they are ca- 
pable of reaching out to and even touching that 
which is infinite and eternal. So perhaps we may 
be better able to do and bear because in times of 
ill health we have found our axoXyj, our true 
school. 

It has been said that "Oxford disheartens a man 
early." Long ago I spent two years in Oxford, 
and lovely as I found the beautiful city, I came to 
understand this saying. Originality is often 
crushed by an atmosphere of criticism, by the 
cynicism and lack of enthusiasm characteristic 
of and cultivated by a certain type of Oxford man. 
What is true of Oxford is I suppose also in a cer- 
tain measure true of Cambridge, but this summer 
I am not finding it so. In the first place there is 
a difference in the towns. Oxford, it has been well 
said, is imposant, while Cambridge is intime. 
Then too it is vacation time, most of the men 
have gone down, I am myself spending the summer 
not in working but in dreaming, and day dreams 
are never disheartening. Since I cannot make his- 
torical researches, I am surrendering myself to 
the charm of the place, finding in it a constant 
demand that I should live up to it, that there 
should be in my own life something to correspond 
to the beauty of King's Chapel and of Trinity 
Back. 

Is beauty, I wonder, conducive to work.? I 



4) IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

remember that Goethe and some other literary 
men have preferred to write in very bare rooms, 
lest the beauty about them should prove distract- 
ing, prevent concentration. I suppose that it is 
with beauty as it is with love. We may make 
love nothing but an emotional luxury, and so we 
may make beauty nothing but an emotional lux- 
ury. On the other hand as love may be the great- 
est incentive to earnest action, to high living, so 
beauty may also be such an incentive. And as it 
is allowable to have times in which we simply en- 
joy love, so also it is allowable to have times in 
which we simply enjoy beauty. "Come ye your- 
selves apart, and rest awhile," rest from action in 
order that ye may feel. Only let the feeling be 
the starting point for new action. Or is it rather 
that after a time we must begin to act in order 
that the action may be the starting point for new 
feeling.? Is feeling the end, or is action the end? 
I am inclined to think that feeling is the greater, 
and therefore the real end, only as there can be no 
great action without feeling, so there can be no 
true feeling without action. 

There have been times when I have found not 
only the English university, but the whole Old 
World disheartening, because of the Past of which 
it speaks so loudly. All has been done that can be 
done ; I am borne down by the weight of the Past. 
This summer I am not having that experience 
either. The Past seems here to encourage us by 
the memory of what men have done, and to call 



IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 5 

upon us to surpass it. There is something too in 
a small country which is stimulating to ambition. 
The scholars, the artists, the statesmen live near 
enough to each other to know and help each other. 
Our country is so vast; each thinker lives in com- 
parative isolation. And then Nature in England 
generally, but especially here on the edge of the 
fen country, is kindly, friendly and sympathetic, 
not big enough to dwarf man. I believe too that 
the mere being in a foreign country is making it 
possible for me to think more clearly than I could 
at home. For I am not a part of it here, and, 
being in a sense wholly out of the life about me, I 
am perhaps better able to collect my thoughts on 
life in general. 

"He who hath watch'd, not shared the strife, 
Knows how the day hath gone." 

But while in one sense I am out of the life here, 
in another sense I am deeply in it. For I love 
this beautiful England and feel strongly that she 
is my mother-country, that I am just a tired child 
come home to rest. 



II 

FRIENDSDHIP 

This is an age in which women, especially in- 
tellectual women, are given to forming strong 
friendships. There are women who find their com- 
fort, their strength, their inspiration in one friend 
who is all in all to them ; — others, perhaps of a 
more expansive nature, have several friends each 
one of whom is in her way supreme. And yet 
many women question the wisdom of these friend- 
ships ; some even who indulge in them are just a 
little ashamed of them; the world is inclined to 
look askance at them, to regard them as abnormal 
feminine weaknesses, and there are those who are 
heard to say that God never meant it to be so, this 
dependence upon each other, this almost passionate 
devotion between persons of the same sex. Per- 
haps we do not remember that these strong friend- 
ships originated not with women, but with men, 
and if we are disposed to condemn them wholesale 
it is certainly because we do not realize how much 
we owe to them. For I think we rarely if ever 
come close to a man who has contributed greatly 
to the order, the justice, the beauty, the thought 
of the world without finding that there was a friend 
who was his inspiration, his very soul. Occasion- 

6 



FRIENDSHIP 7 

ally the wife has been this friend, but previous to 
the nineteenth century this was rare, it was gen- 
erally some other man. Sometimes both friends 
became famous, sometimes only one, but the other 
was always there. The time would fail us to tell 
of David and Jonathan, of Achilles and Patroclus, 
of Damon and Pythias, of Orestes and Pylades, 
of Socrates and Plato, of Paul and Timothy, who 
through friendship overcame mountains of diffi- 
culty, intellectual, moral and physical, and of 
whom the world is slowly beginning to be worthy, 
since it holds them in grateful remembrance. 
Nay, is it not almost blasphemous to ask whether 
God approves of such a relationship, when we re- 
member that our Lord Himself sanctified it, for 
among the twelve who "continued with Him in His 
temptations," there was one who will be known to 
all time as "the disciple whom Jesus loved?" 

Strong friendship is the supreme characteristic 
of that wonderful period of intellectual and spirit- 
ual awakening which embraces the Renascence and 
Reformation. These movements differed in differ- 
ent countries, but everywhere there was the same 
passionate sense of the value of friendship and of 
fellow-work, of what Ruskin calls "co-working and 
army fellowship." I like to think of Rufus 
Mutianus, that typical son of the Renascence, 
whose real name was Conrad Muth, but whose 
friends called him Rufus because of his red hair, 
while after the fashion of the time they latinized 
his last name ; a man who was the very incarnation 



8 IN CAMBRroGE BACKS 

of friendship, a man who, like Jesus and Socrates, 
wrote nothing, but who gathered about him a band 
of friends whom he inspired to think and write 
great things. Then from Italy we find Michael 
Angelo writing, "I cannot enjoy life without the 
soul," and by the soul he means his friend Tom- 
maso Cavalieri. Again in Germany we rejoice in 
Luther and Melancthon, Luther with his clear head 
and vigorous, sometimes harsh will, Melancthon 
with what might be called his almost artistic love 
of learning, his gentleness and sweetness, combined 
with a certain indecision and weakness of practical 
judgment, which sometimes accompanies breadth 
of view. I like even better to remember Staupitz, 
that earlier friend of Luther, the father-confessor 
who was the first to understand the young monk, 
so oppressed with the burden of evil, and to teach 
him the meaning of the words, "I believe in the for- 
giveness of sins." When the pupil became the 
master, Staupitz rejoiced in the inversion of po- 
sition which he had foreseen from the beginning. 
He did not follow Luther out of the Church of 
Rome, the historic church dear to him because of 
so many associations, but it is good to remember 
that a difference of opinion on even so vital a mat- 
ter could not break the friendship. In the last 
year of his life, 1524, we find him writing a letter 
in which he thanks his "beloved Martin" for hav- 
ing led him away "to the living pastures from the 
husks for the pigs," and speaks of his love for him 
as "passing the love of women." As for Luther 



FRIENDSHIP 9 

he always retained for Staupitz the warm affec- 
tion that it is natural to feel for the first person 
who has understood and been able to help. 
Throughout his life he speaks of him as his spirit- 
ual father, toward its close he thanks God that he 
had been "helped out of his temptations by Dr. 
Staupitz, without whom he would have been swal- 
lowed up in them and perished." Surely here was 
a love stronger than death, since in that bitter age 
it was stronger than creeds. 

I myself have found an especial delight in three- 
cornered friendships. There is a fullness and com- 
pleteness about three which two cannot quite have ; 
moreover when full and free fellowship among 
three is possible, it has none of the morbidness 
which is sometimes an element in the dual friend- 
ship. For there is certainly a mystic perfection 
in the number three which man did not invent; 
every material object has three dimensions, every 
polygon must have at least three sides, the human 
mind has three elements, intellect, sensibility and 
will ; at least three are necessary to make a family, 
father, mother and child; even the Godhead, we 
are taught, and reasoning from analogy I find it 
easy to believe, fulfills itself in three Persons. So 
I have sometimes thought that it takes three to 
make an absolutely complete and perfect friend- 
ship, although that is a matter of temperament, 
and generally, perhaps always, two of the three 
are a little closer to each other than the third can 
be to either of them. 



10 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

The Renascence period furnishes a beautiful and 
well-nigh perfect example of a triangular friend- 
ship in that which united Colet, Erasmus and 
More. Colet, a man of twenty-six, "fell in love," 
Mr. Seebohm tells us, with More, a lad of fourteen. 
More whose wit, wisdom and sweetness no man of 
culture could resist. The friendship thus begun 
lasted until death, Colet's death, parted them, 
strengthened not weakened by the fact that some 
years later More formed another friendship which 
partook even more than his affection for Colet of 
the nature of love. For we all know the story of 
how Erasmus and More met at a dinner table, and 
neither knowing who the other was, an argument 
arose, in which each admired the knowledge and 
skill of his antagonist to such an extent that Eras- 
mus cried out, "Aut tu es Morus, aut mullus" to 
which More replied, "Aut tu es Erasmus, aut di- 
abolus." The friendship formed that day became 
famous throughout Christendom, but while poster- 
ity applauds there were contemporaries who, like 
some of our contemporaries under similar circum- 
stances, sneered. Thus Tyndale in an attack upon 
More, sarcastically speaks of Erasmus as "INIore's 
darling," but More did not flinch ; he accepted the 
term. "Erasmus, my darling," he says in the 
reply written for all the world to read, "shall be 
my dear darling still." We find him at one time 
writing to his friend that if there was one thought 
of ambition in his mind, it was the pleasure that he 
felt in knowing that his name would always be as- 



FRIENDSHIP 11 

sociated with that of Erasmus, while Erasmus de- 
clares that More's presence is "more sweet to him 
than anything in life," and adds "In More mihi 
videor extincttus, adeo uia (puxij juxta Pythago- 
ram duobus erat." Nor was Colet crowded out ; as 
long as he lived he was loved and revered by both 
friends, his holiness, Mr. Hutton tells us, an in- 
spiration to Erasmus, while his perfect sanity of 
judgment was a wise restraint upon More. "For 
centuries," says More writing after his death, for 
he was the first of the three to die, "we have not 
had among us any man more learned or more 
holy." The two who were left were drawn closer 
to each other by the memory of him whom they 
had both loved. 

Nor was even this three-cornered friendship ex- 
clusive, there was plenty of room for other affec- 
tions. More's family relations, his beautiful home 
life are too well known to need comment here, but 
there were other friends too. Thus we find him 
writing to Cuthbert Tunstall: "Although every 
letter I receive from you, dearest friend, is very 
pleasant to me, yet that which you wrote last is 
most welcome, for besides the praise which the rest 
of your letters deserve for their eloquence, the last 
yields a peculiar gi'ace, for that it contains your 
own opinion (I would that it were as true as it is 
favorable) of my Utopia. I almost persuade my- 
self that all those things which you spoke of it are 
true, knowing you to be far from all dissimulation, 
and myself too humble to need flattery and too 



12 IN CA^IBRIDGE BACKS 

dear to you to be mocked. Wherefore, whether 
you have seen the truth unfeignedly, I rejoice in 
your judgment, or whether your affection to me 
hath bhndcd your judgment, I am no less de- 
lighted by your love." Again to the same friend, 
"The amber which j^ou sent me, a precious sepul- 
chre of flies was in many respects most welcome to 
me; for the matter thereof may bear comparison 
in color and brightness with any precious stone, 
and the form is more excellent because it represents 
the figure of a heart, as it were the emblem of our 
love ; from which I take your meaning to be that 
between us it will never fly away, and yet be al- 
ways without corruption; because I see the fly 
which hath wings like Cupid, and is as fickle, so 
shut up and enclosed in the amber that it cannot 
fly away, and embalmed and preserved that it can- 
not perish. I am not so much troubled" (a sure 
proof of friendship) "that I cannot send you a 
like gift, for I know you do not expect an inter- 
change of tokens." 

It was the period of the Renascence which, as 
we have seen, was richest in these romantic 
masculine friendships. We are li%T[ng now in an 
age which for women is a Renascence ; we are being 
re-born, finding our own minds, finding our own 
souls, and in the spiritual and intellectual awaken- 
ing which has come to us, it is natural that we 
should repeat the story of the Renascence ; that 
friendship should play the part with us now that 
it played with men then. For friendship is the 



FRIENDSHIP 13 

most intellectual and spiritual of all relationships ; 
it is not in any degree founded upon physical de- 
sire, nor upon the protective instinct, nor as some 
marriages are upon the hope of gain, material, 
social or political, 

" With gold so much, birth, power, repute so much, 
Or beauty, youth so much in lack of these!" 

Friends are friends simply because they like to be 
together; to share each other's thoughts, to live in 
a greater or less degree their intellectual, spirit- 
ual and emotional lives in common, but with think- 
ing persons the emotional is largely the result of 
the intellectual and spiritual. 

Hence I am inclined to think that people who do 
not have fairly strong intellectual and spiritual 
natures, those whose lives are practical but not 
intellectual, moral perhaps but not spiritual, can- 
not, strictly speaking, have friends. Such persons 
often do have beautiful family relationships ; the 
emotional nature is satisfied in the family, in the 
marriage which may have been founded upon pas- 
sion, or may even have been entered upon in a very 
prosaic and businesslike way, but which has become 
a matter of mutual esteem, of being used to each 
other, dependent upon each other, the married 
pair having so long shared all the detail of life that 
they have become so adapted to each other, that 
it is difficult to adapt themselves to any one else, 
even in such small matters as the hours of meals 



14. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

or the way in which coffee should be served. Be- 
tween parents and children there is the physical 
tie, the sense of gratitude and duty on both sides, 
the protective instinct at first of the older for the 
younger, later perhaps of the younger for the 
older ; between brothers and sisters the feeling that 
blood is thicker than water, the similarities 
founded on common antecedents, common and lim- 
ited environment; and in all the family relation- 
ships a strong sense of belonging to each other, 
coupled in these simple families with the fact that 
no one else belongs to them, since they have no 
real friendships. They have neighbors to whom 
they are neighborly, for human nature, especially 
simple human nature, is kind, but they can hardly 
be called friends ; they are people with whom they 
gratify the natural social instincts, talk over the 
every-day of life, help in trouble or are helped 
by, but one neighbor does almost as well as an- 
other, provided he be kind and sociable, the family 
is all in all. 

These natural and physical relationships are 
probably even in the cultured family stronger than 
the intellectual and spiritual, for even when the 
members of such a family are so unfortunate as 
to be lacking in congeniality there is generally a 
great deal of affection ; at very bottom even the 
uncongenial sister is commonly more, though less 
consciously loved, than the congenial friend. 

But friendship is fellowship, it is founded upon 
vital congeniality of spirit, and where this does 



FRIENDSHIP 15 

not exist, there can be no friendship. For this 
reason the Greeks, whose tendency was perhaps to 
over-estimate the intellectual and spiritual, 
thought friendship the holiest of all relationships, 
far holier than marriage. And I am not sure that 
a perfect friendship, a friendship free from the 
flaws of which I shall presently speak, is not holier 
than a fairly comfortable marriage which does 
not include friendship. If the highest marriages 
are higher than the highest friendships, it is be- 
cause they have in them every element of friend- 
ship and much more besides. 

The strongest friendships are ordinarily based 
not upon character, but upon spiritual affinity ; 
that is, there is more of loving than of liking in 
them. For loving is not deeper, stronger liking, 
it is an altogether different thing. We like a per- 
son because of his qualities ; if we find that we have 
been mistaken in these qualities we cease to like 
him. But we go on loving no matter what dis- 
coveries we may make ; for although the character 
may be in some respects objectionable, we feel that 
we are not mistaken in the spirit that lies beneath 
the character, and we love not because of the char- 
acter, but because of the spirit that answers to our 
spirit. So when friendship is absolutely ideal and 
equal, there is no shame in the presence of one's 
friend. I may sorrow deeply over my fault, but 
I am not ashamed to have my friend know about 
it, for she, like God, understands fully, and so 
while she sorrows with me over my sin, her love is 



16 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

strengthened, not weakened by it. In literature I 
know of no more beautiful friendship than that 
between Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways," and 
Lady Emma Dunstane, and the best part of it is 
that when Diana has sinned, she goes to Lady 
Emma with her story, fully expecting the sympa- 
thy that she receives ; she is ashamed of her sin, 
but she is not ashamed that Lady Emma should 
know it. And in this affair Diana is greater than 
Lady Emma, for it takes more love and trust to 
be sure of receiving sympathy in such a case than 
it takes to give it. 

" I bow before the noble mind 
That freely some great wrong forgives, 
Yet nobler is the one forgiven, 
Who bears that burden well and lives." 

I like to remember too that St. John was the only 
other apostle present when St. Peter denied his 
Lord, and from that time we find St. Peter and St. 
John inseparable. 

When we define taste in the largest and deepest 
sense, I suppose we love our friends more because 
their taste is in harmony with ours than because 
their characters are in such harmony, for taste is 
really a deeper and truer manifestation of spirit 
than is character. What a man is depends not 
so much upon what he does as upon what he likes, 
though of course doing sometimes begets liking.'^ 

1 " I want you to think a little of the deep significance 
of the word taste, for no statement of mine has been more 



FRIENDSHIP 17 

A distinction, however, must be made between 
taste and tastes ; it is only the former that is es- 
sential. It is not necessary that my friend and I 
should always care for the same people, the same 
books, the same pictures, the same music ; but 
underneath the tastes we must feel that the taste 
is essentially the same, though some of its mani- 
festations may differ or even be antagonistic. 

While there can be liking without loving, there 
probably cannot be loving such as friends have 
for each other without some liking. For while 
when we once begin to love, we continue to do so 
no matter what discoveries we may make, we prob- 
ably do not begin to love where the faults most 
obnoxious to us are present, for these we are quick 
to detect, and they are an effectual bar to love. 
Sometimes we begin with loving and proceed to lik- 
ing, sometimes we begin with liking and proceed to 
loving. In the former case the friendship is 
formed rapidly, for the friends do not have to 

earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is 
essentially a moral quality. . . . Taste is not only a 
part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The 
first and last and closest trial question to any living crea- 
ture is, What do you like? Tell me what you like, and I 
will tell you what you are. Go out into the street and ask 
the first man or woman that you meet what their taste is, 
and if they answer candidly, you know them body and soul. 
And the object of the true education is to make people 
not only do the right things, but enjoy the right things, 
not merely industrious but to love industry, not merely 
learned but to love knowledge, not merely pure but to 
love purity; not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after 
justice." — Ruskin "Crown of Wild Olive." 



18 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

learn to know each other, they know and love per- 
haps at first sight. In a highly sensitive mood 
two spirits come into contact, and each recognizes 
in the other the counterpart of itself. Sometimes 
this is a delusion, when the moment of exaltation 
is over they find they they have been mistaken, 
that they have been in love with love, not with each 
other, but sometimes it is the beginning of a real 
and powerful friendship. There is generally 
great spiritual excitement at first, but as the 
friends come to know each other practically as 
they have from the beginning known each other 
spiritually this calms down, only to re-appear 
when there is something special, some great joy 
or siorrow to call it forth. 

The friendships that begin with liking are 
slower and more commonplace. People are 
thrown together, work together, think together, 
approve of each other's principles and opinions, 
share each other's joys and sorrows, trials and 
temptations, until by degrees they recognize that 
they are necessary to each other, that so far as 
trust, admiration, tenderness and mutual service 
constitute love, they love each other. 

This is the safer and surer friendship; some- 
times I think that it is the better, but then I re- 
member that when Socrates had come to this con- 
clusion, he though that he heard a voice saying in 
his ear that he had been guilty of impiety, and be- 
cause he was afraid of the God-Love, he made a 
solemn recantation. This quiet and comparatively 



FRIENDSHIP 19 

unemotional friendship is certainly the safer ; we 
run no risk of being mistaken in ourselves or in the 
other ; nor is there the excitement at the beginning 
which for some natures takes so much strength ; it 
is "for help and comfort in all the passages of life 
and death" ; perhaps for those of us who are only 
average beings, it may be just as helpful, help us 
to live our average lives as well as that other 
friendship, but after all it is not the highest, for 
as Socrates points out, great things are not 
bom of it, it is not by it that creative souls are 
stimulated to create. And perhaps it is well that 
creative aspirations should sometimes be aroused 
even in those of us who are not capable of creating 
much, that the spiritual nature (and what is 
spiritual is always creative, it is the spirit that 
giveth life) should be consciously stirred, if only 
that we may thereby appreciate the creations of 
others. For whatever is spiritual uplifts us to 
Him who is Spirit. "Love is of God, and he that 
loveth" (not loveth God, but loveth any one) "is 
born of God, and knoweth God." "Blessed are 
the pure in heart, for they shall see God," and 
nothing purifies the heart as love does, for where 
love is there is no room for vulgarity. Moreover 
when the mind is in this exalted state, it is too up- 
lifted to feel petty annoyances, and it is not un- 
usual for the body to be insensible to pain because 
of love. 

Then since friendship is such a high and holy 
thing, since men have always had extreme friend- 



20 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

ships with profit not only to themselves but to the 
world, why should such friendships between women 
be looked upon askance? In order to be happy 
and useful, woman must have her emotional nature 
satisfied, and must have work to do which will give 
her a place in the world, make her feel that she is 
worth while. The married woman finds both her 
work and the satisfaction of her emotional nature 
in marriage. The old maid of a by-gone gener- 
ation was unhappy and disagreeable, when she was 
unhappy and disagreeable, because there was no 
person and no definite work which she could call 
her own. The unmarried woman now tends to 
find her work in some business or profession ; why 
should not her emotional nature be satisfied in 
friendship, as the married woman's is in mar- 
riage.? 

I suppose that the answer of the objectors would 
be that these friendships take too much strength 
with too little results. To most people emotional 
situations are a strain, the first ecstasy of a sud- 
den friendship, like the first ecstasy of love be- 
tween the sexes, takes strength. Nor is it anything 
against either relationship that it takes strength 
at first, — all great things take strength, the 
thorough enjoyment of great music, great pic- 
tures, great books, how much more a great love.? 
The question is not does it take strength, but does 
it give as much as it takes? Are the joy and 
pain with which love begins travail throes from 
which something will be born? or is the so-called 



FRIENDSHIP ai 

love merely what Mazzini has described as "I'ego- 
isme a deux personnes, a jealous and convul- 
sive passion, half pride, half thirst of enjoyment 
which narrows the sphere of our activity, and 
causes us to forget our duties both towai'd our 
country and toward humanity?" 

Now however emotional and absorbed lovers may 
be at first, there is little danger that love will take 
their strength or narrow them for any length of 
time. For marriage means new work whether the 
married wish it or not, and in the multiplicity of 
duties the conscious emotionalism dies out; only 
a blessed sense of companionship is left. I know 
a woman who is a very emotional friend ; she once 
told me that it was well that she had never mar- 
ried, for she would have been a more emotional 
wife than any man could stand. But darning 
stockings and calculating expenses would prob- 
ably have cured her of over-emotionalism ; she 
would have been a less emotional wife than she was 
a friend. 

And of course the work that marriage brings 
with it is a blessing in itself, apart from the 
quieting of the emotional nature. Society knows 
that it will almost always gain by marriage, not 
only in the perpetuation of the race, but also in 
the greater attention to business on the part of 
the man, the broadening of social interests on the 
part of the woman, and in the development of 
character and deeper sympathies which come to 
both from the constant sacrifices which they have 



22 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

to make for each other and for their children, the 
problems which they have to solve together, the 
sufferings, the anxieties and the joys which come 
to a family, and which cannot come to isolated in- 
dividuals. 

JBut society is not so sure that it will gain by 
friendship, for generally no new duties are abso- 
lutely forced upon us with it; there is the oppor- 
tunity, and to certain temperaments there is a 
strong temptation to make enjoying each other 
the main thing in life. If this temptation is 
yielded to the emotionalism continues and becomes 
morbid, and there is not the development that mar- 
riage brings. For women the danger is greater 
than for men, partly because we have not natur- 
ally so many interests, partly because we are not 
so strong physically, and possibly in some cases 
because we are more demonstrative, and demon- 
strations of emotionalism tend to increase the 
emotionalism. It may be that it would be better 
that women should live in this respect more as 
men do, with less physical expression of affection. 
Friendship is a spiritual relationship ; why should 
it need physical expression? 

Perhaps friendship is almost too blissful to be as 
developing in some respects as is marriage ; there 
is too little friction in it, for the circumstances of 
friendship do not bring out, as the circumstances 
of marriage do, those little commonplace differ- 
ences which must exist even between those who in 
all important matters are well adapted to each 



FRIENDSHIP 23 

other. And in the other family relations those be- 
tween parents and children, brothers and sisters, 
there is often a real uncongeniality ; there are in 
almost every family certain members who, if it 
were not for the tie of blood could not be friends, 
and in the adapting themselves to each other, 
there is a discipline which means breadth and self- 
control. Mr. Chesterton is right when he main- 
tains that the family is a good institution quite 
as much because it is uncongenial as because it is 
congenial. Friendship is narrower than the fam- 
ily relation just because it is more congenial. 

The great safeguard against both the over- 
emotionalism and the narrowness of friendship is 
in work. It is only when emotionalism is followed 
by nothing else that it defeats its own end and uses 
up strength instead of creating it. For passion 
is energy, but energy must find an outlet in work, 
physical or mental, else it feeds upon itself. Since 
friendship does not necessarily bring new work 
with it as marriage does let the friends either find 
some new work to do, or make the old work better 
because of their friendship. Let the new emotion- 
alism mean new life, let the new life go into the 
work, make the friendship in some sense creative. 
Then the friends will not only be saved from a 
dangerous emotional strain, but they will accom- 
plish something that will be useful to themselves 
and to others, and the friendship will be made 
more secure, since growth is an essential to per- 
manent friendship. Furthermore there will be 



24. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

little danger of exclusiveness or jealousy. It 
makes very little difference what my exact place 
is with my friend; probably she does not know. 
It is enough that we love each other, and that we 
help each other to live our lives and to do our 
work. 

I had a teacher who used to say, "Love is the 
white heat fusion of the intellect, sensibility and 
will." The difficulty with many friendships is 
that it is the sensibility, the emotional nature 
alone, which is at a white heat. Let the intellect 
and will do their part, and there will be little 
danger. The salvation of friendship as of every- 
thing else lies in symmetry; — the height, the 
breadth and the depth of it should be equal. 

It is Plato who has best summed up the whole 
matter. And I think he knew of what he wrote, 
for had not Socrates been the lover and he himself 
the beloved.'' and have not Europe and America 
been the better for more than two thousand years 
because these two men loved each other.? Listen 
then to what the wise woman of Mantincia said to 
Socrates : 

"Men whose bodies only are creative betake 
themselves to women and beget children, — this is 
the character of their love. But creative souls, 
for there certainly are men who are more creative 
in their souls than in their bodies, conceive that 
which is proper for the soul to receive or retain. 
And what are these conceptions .?* wisdom and vir- 
tue in general. And such creators are poets and 



FRIENDSHIP 25 

all artists who are deserving of the name inventor. 
But the greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far 
is that which is concerned with the ordering of 
states and families, and which is called temperance 
and justice. And he who in youth has the seed 
of these planted in him, and is himself inspired, 
when he comes to maturity desires to beget and 
generate. He wanders about s-eeking beauty that 
he may beget offspring, for in deformity he will 
beget nothing, and naturally embraces the beauti- 
ful rather than the deformed body ; above all when 
he finds a fair and noble and well-nurtured soul, 
he embraces the two in one person, and to such an 
one he is full of speech about virtue and the nature 
and pursuits of a good man ; and he tries to edu- 
cate him, and at the touch of the beautiful which 
is ever-present to his memory, even when absent, 
he brings forth that which he had conceived long 
before, and in company with him tends that which 
he brings forth ; and they are married by a far 
nearer tie, and have a closer friendship than those 
who beget mortal children, for the children who 
are their common offspring are fairer and more 
immortal. Who, when he thinks of Homer and 
Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather 
have their children than the ordinary human ones ? 
Who would not emulate them in the creation of 
children such as theirs, which have preserved their 
memory and given them everlasting glory.? Or 
who would not have such children as Lycurgus 
left behind him to be the saviours not only of 



26 IN CAJMBRIDGE BACKS 

Lacedsemon, but of Hellas, as one may say? 
There is Solon, too, who is the revered father of 
Athenian laws, and many others there are in many 
other places both among Hellenes and barbarians. 
All of them have given the world many noble 
works, and have been the parents of virtue of every 
kind, and many temples have been raised in their 
honor for the sake of their children, which are 
never raised in honor of any one for the sake of 
his mortal children. These are the lesser mys- 
teries of love into which even you, Socrates, may 
enter ; to the greater and more hidden ones which 
are the crown of these, and to which if you pursue 
them in a right spirit they will lead, I know not 
whether you will be able to attain. But I will do 
my utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you 
can. For he who would proceed aright in this 
matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful 
forms ; and first, if he would be guided by his in- 
structor aright to love one form only ; out of that 
he should create fair thoughts ; and soon he will 
of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is 
akin to the beauty of another ; and then if beauty 
of form in general is his pursuit how foolish would 
he be not to recognize that the beauty in every 
form is one and the same ! And when he perceives 
this he will begin a love of all beautiful forms, and 
drawing toward and contemplating the vast sea of 
beauty, he will create many fair and noble 
thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom ; 
until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, 



FRIENDSHIP 27 

and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single 
science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. 
He who has been instructed thus far in the things 
of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful 
in due order and succession, when he comes toward 
the end will suddenly perceive a nature of won- 
drous beauty, a nature which in the first place is 
everlasting, not growing and decaying or waxing 
and waning. — And the true order of going or be- 
ing led by another to the things of love is to use 
the beauties of earth as steps along which he 
mounts upward for the sake of that other beauty, 
— until he arrives at the notion of absolute beaut}', 
and at last knows what the essence of beauty is, 
and attains that life above all others which man 
should live in the contemplation of Beauty Ab- 
solute. For what if man had eyes to see the true 
beauty, the divine beauty, I mean pure and clear 
and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollution of 
mortality.'' — Do you not see that in that com- 
munion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the 
mind, he will be enabled to bring forth not images 
of beauty, but realities, for he has hold not of an 
image but of a reality, and bringing forth and 
nourishing true virtue to become the friend of 
God, and immortal, if mortal man may !" 



Ill 

THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 

Among the Essays of Elia there is one entitled 
"The Old and The New Schoolmaster," in which 
the old schoolmaster is described as a "fine old 
pedagogue of the breed long since extinct of the 
Lilys and Linacres, who believing that all learn- 
ing was contained in the languages which they 
taught, and despising every other accomplishment 
as superficial and useless, came to their task as to 
a sport. Passing from infancy to age, they 
dreamed away all their days as in a grammar 
school. Revolving in a perpetual cycle of declen- 
sions, conjugations, syntax and prosodies, review- 
ing constantly the occupation that had claimed 
their studious childhood, rehearsing continually 
the part of the Past, life must have slipped from 
them at last like one day." With this joyous and 
joy-giving race, he contrasts "the modem school- 
master, a most pathetic being who is expected to 
know a little of everything, because his pupil is 
required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. 
He must be superficially, if I may say so, omnis- 
cient, and all the things that he knows, these or 
the desire of them, he is expected to instil not by 
set lessons which he may charge in the bill, but at 

28 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 29 

school-intervals as he walks the streets or saunters 
through the fields with his pupils. The least part 
of what is expected of him is to be done in school 
hours. He must insinuate knowledge at the 
mollia tempora fandi. He must seize every oc- 
casion, — the season of the year, the time of the 
day, a passing cloud, a rainbow, a wagon of hay, 
a regiment of soldiers going by to inculcate some- 
thing useful. He can receive no pleasure from a 
casual glimpse of nature, but must catch at it as 
an object of instruction. Nothing comes to him 
not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral 
uses. The Universe, that Great Book, as it has 
been called, is to him indeed to all intents and 
purposes a book out of which he is doomed to read 
tedious homilies to distasting school-boys." 

I fancy that the gentle Elia took a somewhat 
pessimistic view of the schoolmaster even of his 
day, and yet doubtless there was much truth in the 
dark picture which he drew. But the reason why 
the fine old pedagogues were happy, loved and 
honored, and their successors of Lamb's day were 
unhappy, and shall I say unloved and dishonored? 
is perfectly obvious. The schoolmaster of the 
"fine old breed of the Lilys and Linacres" was 
happy because he was teaching one subject, clas- 
sics, the only subject deemed worth knowing, and 
which he knew or was reverently striving to know, 
as well as it could be known in his generation. 
This subject filled him with happiness, so that he 
taught not out of a sense of duty (conscientious 



30 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

teaching is never the highest teaching), but out of 
joy and with an eagerness that others should 
know the joy that filled his soul; should drink of 
the fountain of Truth, Wisdom and Beauty that 
had been opened to him. His attitude toward his 
pupils was "What the Father hath given me, that 
give I unto you." So he taught them reverence 
and enthusiasm, and no wonder that the reverence 
and enthusiasm which the pupil felt for the thing 
taught was in some measure extended to him who 
taught, that there was a wonderful friendship be- 
tween master and pupils. For friendship is fel- 
lowship, and fellowship in those days in which 
Montaigne's father "received all who knew Greek 
as though they were angels of God," was largely 
founded on enthusiasm for the classics, the one 
subject which all educated men had in common, 
the one subject which until very recently all edu- 
cated men in England still had in common, thus 
making possible a comradeship among English 
scholars not found among the scholars of other 
countries. 

But Charles Lamb lived in the days of our 
grandfathers ; his lot fell upon those evil times 
when the number of subjects and what was known 
of them had increased, and yet had not increased 
beyond the point where the schoolmaster could, 
by making a drudge of himself, know a little of 
each, hence he was required to do so, to be "super- 
ficially omniscient." The schoolmaster of the 
"breed of the Lilys and Linacres" knew nearly all 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 31 

that there was to know, but then there was not 
much, so he had tune to know it leisurely and well, 
to brood over it, and to love it. The schoolmaster 
of Lamb's day still tried to know everything, that 
was still the ideal, but everything by that time 
meant so many things, that, trying to know all, 
it was impossible for him to know anything more 
than superficially ; thus he did not brood over the 
beauty of Truth or of any portion of it, he did 
not live with it, he did not love it. Life was just 
a nervous strain, a wild chase after knowledge 
which because of its vastness his mind could 
not comprehend, and his spirit could still less 
apprehend, and in which he took no inter- 
est save to pass it on to some one else, who, to use 
Charles Lamb's quaint expression, "distasted" it 
even more than he did. Of course the knowledge 
which he thus imparted to his pupils could not be 
a bond of fellowship between them, since neither 
pupil nor teacher really loved it. 

Lamb's new schoolmaster was not unique, he 
was just like any one else who has more to do than 
mind or body can stand, incapable of consciously 
and emotionally loving anything, whether Truth, 
Beauty, Work, Man or God. A friend once told 
me that she had always thought the love between 
her parents the most beautiful thing that she had 
ever known, but when after her father's death she 
spoke of it in that way to her mother the reply 
was, "Yes, so long as you can remember. But it 
was not always so. When we were first married 



32 IN CAJVIBRIDGE BACKS 

we were very poor, and had to work very hard, so 
we were too tired to be conscious even of loving 
each other, and of course we didn't love our work ; 
there was too much of it." Yes, there was too 
much of it. and it was too hurried for them to do 
it either well or lovingly ; they could not feel the 
artist's joy in perfect workmanship; their work 
was only a task to get through with. That 
was the case of Charles Lamb's modern school- 
master. 

It is many years since Elia wrote, and times 
have changed. His "new schoolmaster" has now 
become the "old schoolmaster," and though his 
breed is not entirely extinct, he is passing away 
to give place to him whom we now call the "new 
schoolmaster." Of this new schoolmaster I can- 
not say much from personal experience, but the 
new schoolmistress I know full well. So I will 
write of her, and much of what is true of her is 
doubtless true also of the new schoolmaster. Our 
new schoolmistress differs from Elia's new school- 
master, because we have in some sense gone back 
to the breed of Lily and Linacre, and I trust that 
as time goes on we may do so still more. For now 
the field of knowledge is so vast that there is no 
hope of becoming even "superficially omniscient," 
so we no longer try to be so. We have become 
specialists as Lily and Linacre were, the difference 
between us and them is that we know that all 
knowledge is not contained in the subjects which 
we teach, and therefore it is impossible for us to 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 33 

do as they did, and "despise every other accom- 
plishment as superficial and useless." We have 
even passed the times in which men tried (I don't 
suppose women ever did try) to know "something 
about everything and everything about some- 
thing." We are content now if in times of recrea- 
tion we can learn a little about several things, 
while in working times we learn a little more about 
the one thing that we have chosen to teach, be- 
cause we love it best. With this limited aim each 
may work at her own subject, with the same leis- 
ure, the same unhasting diligence, the same fruit- 
ful dreaminess with which Lily and Linacre worked 
at theirs, and each may love her subject as the 
great teachers of old loved their Homer and Vir- 
gil, a,nd may have the same joy in imparting it 
that they had. 

For notwithstanding Plato to the contrary, I 
believe that no one can be a good teacher who does 
not love to teach, who is not so filled with the sub- 
ject that he must impart it to others, who does not 
have something of the "I must tell you, or I'll 
burst" feeling. I suppose that what Plato means 
when he says that no one can be a good teacher 
who wishes to teach is that no one can be a good 
teacher who considers himself other men's superior, 
and therefore capable of teaching them. But 
does anything tend more toward humility than en- 
thusiasm for that which is great .f* "I must tell 
you, or I'll burst," not that you may admire me for 
knowing or understanding, but that you may come 



34. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

to know and understand, and therefore enjoy as I 
enjoy, — something of the feeling which Andrew 
had when he found his brother Simon, and said to 
him, "We have found Him of whom Moses in the 
law and the prophets did write," the feeling which 
John the Baptist had when he proclaimed, "the 
Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the 
world," knowing all the time, and rejoicing in the 
knowledge, that "He must increase, while I must 
decrease." For finding or understanding even a 
little portion of the truth rouses a feeling in some 
measure akin to that which one has in finding or 
understanding a little of Him who is the Whole 
Truth. 

Is it too much then to say that no one should 
teach a subject who does not love it, who does not 
love it enough to wish to impart it to others, and 
to be in some way going on with it herself? All 
good schools make such a requirement of music 
and art teachers. It is necessary that the music 
teacher should not only have a certain training in 
music, but also that she should love music, that 
she should have some talent for it, and that in 
addition to teaching she should be doing some- 
thing with her own music. Is it too much to ask 
that the teacher of mathematics should be as much 
of an artist in her own line as the teacher of music 
is in hers? that she should not only have the re- 
quisite training, but that she should love mathe- 
matics, have some special talent for it, and 
be either actually going on in the subject, or be 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 35 

constantly working out new ways of presenting 
that which she already knows, and that she should 
somehow make some vital connection between 
mathematics and life, Avhich makes her eager to 
teach mathematics to her pupils? 

And frequently the truly great teacher with a 
real mastery of her subject will take the most 
pleasure in teaching elementary work, because she 
will see the whole wrapped up in the beginning, so 
that she will never think that it is a small thing to 
teach the beginning. It is too often assumed 
that the elements of a subject can be taught by 
any young girl who happens to know them ; some- 
times she is not even required to know them par- 
ticularly well, and of course she knows nothing be- 
yond them. Never was there a more fatal mis- 
take. The ideal teacher of elementary work is 
the mature woman who is, so far as is possible, 
mistress of the subject. Not that I should say 
to the young teacher. Be content with elementary 
work, since it is as great, perhaps a greater thing 
than advanced work. For to the young woman it 
is not so great a thing as advanced work, for the 
reason that she herself is as yet too limited to 
make it so. So she may not, while she is young, 
be happy in it, because if she is a growing person 
she will not be content to do it in a little way, and 
she has not as yet the outlook which would enable 
her to do it in a big way. Therefore I should ad- 
vise her at first to seek as advanced work as she 
can get. Through teaching advanced work she 



36 IN CA^IBRIDGE BACKS 

will come to see what a big thing elementary work 
is, then she will herself be big enough to come back 
to the elementary work, and to teach it with enthu- 
siasm. When we have once done what the world 
considers the greater thing we are the more will- 
ing to do what the world considers the smaller 
thing, for we see that there is no big or little, it all 
lies in the doing of it. In the doing, the small 
thing can be made great, the great thing can be 
made small. 

We have seen that the students of the days of 
Lily and Linacre did not clearly distinguish be- 
tween love and reverence for Homer and Virgil, 
and love and reverence for him through whom they 
became acquainted with Homer and Virgil. And 
not only were teacher and taught bound by their 
common enthusiasm, but that Renascence period, 
as we all know, was characterized by glowing, 
passionate friendships between mature scholars, 
many of whom were teachers. Those were days 
in which men loved each other as in the days of 
David and Jonathan and the old Greeks, as per- 
haps men never had loved each other since the 
little band of those who had been with Jesus, 
united by a common love for their ascended Lord, 
ceased to squabble as to who should be the great- 
est, and lovingly vied with each other in witness- 
ing to the power of His resurrection. 

But Charles Lamb represents his new school- 
master as not only finding no emotional satisfac- 
tion in his work, but as denied both the affection 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 37 

of his pupils, and the friendship of his contempo- 
raries. He quotes from a letter for which he says 
he is "indebted to his cousin Bridget," in which 
"a sensible man of his profession" writes, "Persons 
in my situation are more to be pitied than can be 
well imagined. We are surrounded by young and 
consequently ardently affectionate hearts, but we 
can never hope to share an atom of their affec- 
tions. The relation of master and scholar for- 
bids this. 'How pleasing this must be to you, how 
I envy your feelings,' my friends will sometimes say 
to me, when they see young men whom I have edu- 
cated return after some years' absence from 
school, their eyes shining with pleasure while they 
shake hands with their old master, bringing a 
present of game to me, or a toy to my wife, and 
thanking me in the warmest manner for my care 
of their education. A holiday is begged for the 
boys ; the house is a scene of happiness. I only 
am sad at heart. This fine-spirited and warm- 
hearted youth, who fancies that he repays his 
master with gratitude for his care of his boyish 
years, this young man in the eight long years I 
watched over him with a parent's anxiety never 
could repay me with one look of genuine feeling. 
He was proud when I praised, he was submissive 
when I reproved; but he did never love me, and 
what he now mistakes for gratitude and kindness 
for me is but the pleasant sensation which all per- 
sons feel at revisiting the scene of their boyish 
hopes and fears, and the seeing on equal terms 



38 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

the man they were accustomed to look up to with 
reverence." 

And what this poor schoolmaster missed from 
his pupils was not made up to him by his contem- 
poraries. "Why," asks Elia, "are we never quite 
at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Be- 
cause we are conscious that he is not quite at ease 
in ours. He is awkward and out of place in the 
society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from 
among his little people, and he cannot fit the stat- 
ure of his understanding to yours. He cannot 
meet you on the square. He is so used to teach- 
ing that he wants to be teaching you. He is for- 
lorn among his co-evals ; his juniors cannot be 
his friends." 

I think that we have analyzed the situation of 
Lamb's "new schoolmaster" sufficiently to see why 
this, though probably an exaggerated picture, has 
some truth in it. For the knowledge which 
neither of them loved could not create affection 
between master and pupil, and the master was 
too hard worked, too much of a drudge to make 
of himself a cultivated man who could meet culti- 
vated contemporaries on equal terms. But is the 
schoolmistress of to-day condemned to a life of 
such isolation.'' First, does she fail to secure the 
affection of her pupils.? That depends upon what 
is meant by affection. Strictly speaking, I think 
that there can hardly be friendship between 
teacher and pupil, for friendship to my mind 
means a mutual entering into each other's lives. 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 39 

It cannot therefore be formed between two persons 
who differ greatly in maturity ; it can no more be 
formed when these persons are mother and daugh- 
ter than when they are teacher and pupil. For 
however much love there may be between them, 
the younger cannot enter fully into the elder's 
life. And it is seldom that the elder can enter 
fully into the younger's life, or at least succeed 
in convincing her that she can. We have a way 
of forgetting our own youth ; even when we do not 
forget it intellectually, we often forget it sympa- 
thetically. Sometimes what we are now pleased 
to call the foolishness of young persons, instead 
of calling forth our sympathy makes us blush 
with shame and mortification, remembering some 
familiar passage in our own youth, and instead 
of attracting us repels us, for we do not like to 
be made ashamed even of our past selves. And 
if the likeness to our own youth occasionally keeps 
us apart, even more does the unlikeness. For the 
girl of to-day is different from the girl of our day, 
and unless we are very quick at adjusting our- 
selves to the difference, that is another reason for 
not fully understanding her. 

Yet though we teachers may often misunder- 
stand, I maintain that we who live constantly sur- 
rounded by young girls, and who make it our busi- 
ness to try to understand them, have a better 
chance of doing so than other women of our age, 
even though they be mothers. And as there is 
almost always real affection between mother and 



40 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

daughter, though not equal friendship, so there is 
frequently affection between teacher and pupil 
that is honest, real and personal. Occasionally 
this affection ripens into friendship, just as the 
affection between mother and daughter should al- 
ways ripen into friendship. For a time comes 
when the pupil, like the daughter, attains her ma- 
turity, and perhaps can put more into her former 
teacher's life than the teacher can put into her 
life. 

But we teachers are finite, our time and strength 
is limited, we have many pupils and we cannot enter 
into personal relations with any large proportion 
of them. Perhaps it is not desirable that we 
should try to do so, for we must save ourselves 
for the class-room, and it may be better that our 
pupils should see us only when we can be at our 
best. Yet there is often a great deal of intellec- 
tual and spiritual sympathy, such as almost 
amounts to affection, between pupils and teachers 
who in personal ways scarcely know each other. 
There are moments in the class-room when "eye 
lights eye in good fellowship, and hearts," teach- 
er's and pupils' hearts, "expand and become one 
in the sense of this world's life." It is wonderful 
too how a teacher will sometimes become dependent 
upon the sympathy of a single pupil, perhaps one 
hardly known to her outside of the class-room. 
I have had times when there was a lump in my 
throat, when I have felt that I could not teach 
a lesson, because of the absence from the class of 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 41 

a pupil with whom I was strongly in sympathy, 
with whom I was in the habit of laughing or feel- 
ing deeply; sometimes it has been a pupil with 
whom in a purely social way I had scarcely ex- 
changed a sentence. I remember that Sonya 
Kovalevsky writes to a colleague of hers in the 
University of Stockholm who had been in the habit 
of attending her lectures, "Do not come to hear 
me to-day, if you have a headache. I will try to 
lecture just as well as though you were there." 
A woman commenting upon this in one of our 
American magazines condemned Sonya as "wo- 
manish" after all, not really absorbed in her sub- 
ject, dependent upon the inspiration that came 
to her from a single auditor, perhaps lecturing 
mainly to gain his admiration. But one of our 
most prominent American professors of mathe- 
matics, a man, replying to this, said that Sonya's 
weakness, if weakness it could be called, was at 
least not confined to womankind, for every teacher, 
whether man or woman, knows what it is to be 
thus dependent upon the sympathy of an audience, 
frequently too upon the sympathy of a single per- 
son in that audience. No, we do not crave ad- 
miration, but we do crave sympathy. We wish to 
feel that others are moved by that which moves 
us. This sympathy we generally get when we 
deserve it. And while the brightening of the eyes 
and the occasional clasping of the hands, which 
are the tokens of it, do not always mean even in- 
cipient friendship, they do mean that teacher and 



4® IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

pupil will always be glad to meet, to hear of each 
other, and that they will always think of each 
other affectionately. Of course we know that this 
sympathy is often purely sentimental, a combina- 
tion of the intellectual and the emotional that has 
no real influence upon the life. The teacher has 
interested the pupil, but has not influenced her. 
But is not this often also true of the sympathy be- 
tween the preacher and his audience? And did 
not the Divine Teacher tell us that much of the 
seed would, must perhaps, fall upon stony ground, 
where there was not much deepness of earth, and 
that the seed that fell so would spring up quickly, 
but would also soon wither away? So we must 
not be discouraged because of this, but rather be 
thankful that occasionally we do have evidence 
that some of the seed does fall upon good ground, 
and brings forth abundantly. 

Elia's poor schoolmaster was, as we have seen, 
even less at home with his contemporaries than 
he was with his pupils. This seems to have been 
not only because he was too busy to cultivate in- 
terests which would bring him in touch with them, 
but also because he never saw them long enough 
to get used to them. For alas ! poor man ! his 
work did not cease when the term ended. "Vaca- 
tions themselves are none to him, he is only rather 
worse off" than before; for commonly he has some 
intrusive upper boy fastened upon him at such 
times, some cadet of a great family, some neg- 
lected lump of nobility or gentry that he must 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 43 

drag after him to the play, to the panorama, to 
Mr, Bentley's Orrery, to the Pantopticon, or into 
the country to a friend's house, or to his favorite 
watering place. Wherever he goes this uneasy 
shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and 
in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy- 
rid, sick of perpetual boy." 

That is not the way in which we new school- 
mistresses spend our vacations. We say a real 
good-bye to our pupils when school closes, in order 
that when we come back to them we may be more 
to them. Our vacations are given to rest, to 
pleasure, to family life, sometimes to intellectual 
work of our own. It is wonderful too how quickly 
the one life drops out to give place to the other. 
Except for the memories, when we are away from 
school it is as though we were never there ; when 
we are in school it is as though we were never 
away, so quickly do we fit into either life, and each 
supports and strengthens the other. It is the life 
away from school that enriches the school life and 
makes it more beautiful, but just as truly does the 
school life enrich the other life and make it more 
beautiful. There are the wonderful trips to 
Europe which teachers take more frequently than 
do other people who are not rich, the rest of the 
ocean steamers, the pleasant chance acquaintances 
with the varied interests which they impart to us, 
the sight-seeing, the musing and dreaming, the 
studying sometimes in foreign lands. And even 
when we do not go abroad we still utilize our long 



44. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

vacations in storing up summer driftwood for the 
winter fire. We live simple lives with father and 
mother, brothers and sisters, such as keep us in 
touch with the ordinary life of womankind. We 
think, we read, we receive and write letters, thus 
keeping up old acquaintances while we make new 
ones. Then in the winter vacations there are the 
operas and the theatres, the picture galleries and 
the blessed Christmas time when, through letters, 
many generations of friends and pupils gather 
around us, and all the past chapters of life are re- 
opened. 

For we new schoolmistresses do make friends 
among our contemporaries ; it is safe to say that 
no other class of women makes so many. The 
married woman has her husband and her children ; 
she does not need, and the circumstances of her 
life do not generally permit her to have many 
close friends, and the unmarried woman who lives 
at home has commonly a much more limited num- 
ber from among whom to choose. Our difficulty 
is that we have too many, so many new friends 
constantly coming into our lives, that the days 
and years are not long enough for us to give time 
to all the people that are dear to us. As to 
whether we try to instruct our contemporaries, 
well, that is for our contemporaries to say. 
Probably most people do know that we are teach- 
ers without being told, but what of that? Do not 
people generally recognize a clergyman, a doctor, 
a lawyer, a business man, a mother without being 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 45 

told? And is it such a disgrace to be a teacher 
that we should dislike being recognized as such? 
But while we have friends who are not teachers, 
our dearest friends are generally among our col- 
leagues, and that begins another chapter. 

To complete the isolation of Elia's school- 
master, his occupation had caused estrangement 
between himself and his wife, his gentle Anna. 
"My wife too," he writes, "my once darling Anna 
is the wife of a schoolmaster. When I married 
her, knowing that the wife of a schoolmaster 
ought to be a busy, notable creature, and fearing 
that my gentle Anna would ill supply the loss of 
my dear mother just then dead, I expressed my 
fears that I was bringing her into a way of life 
unsuited to her ; and she who loved me tenderly 
promised for my sake to exert herself to perform 
the duties of her new situation. She promised, 
and she has kept her word. But I have lost my 
gentle, helpless Anna! When we sit down to en- 
joy our hour's repose after the fatigue of the day, 
I am compelled to listen to what have been her 
useful (and they are really useful) employments 
through the day, and what she proposes for her 
to-morrow's task. Her heart and her features 
are changed by the duties of her situation. To 
the boys she never appears other than the master's 
wife, and she looks upon me as the boys' master, 
to whom all show of love and affection would be 
highly improper and unbecoming the dignity of 
her situation and mine." 



46 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

Our new schoolmistress has commonly no wise 
and strong John to deteriorate because he is a 
teacher's husband ; she often lives in an institution 
and has no home, or at least no house. But when 
Max Miiller tried to imagine the conditions of life 
under which he could best do his work, he decided 
upon those offered by the mediaeval monastery, and 
for the scene of his own life-work he chose the Eng- 
lish university, as being the nearest approach to 
the mediaeval monastery that modern times can 
furnish. In our girls' boarding-schools and col- 
leges, a woman may live the monastic life more 
nearly than anywhere else. And while I think a 
woman should not come to that life too early, for 
she should have something to bring to it, I am ab- 
normal enough to like it, for it furnishes in such 
rich abundance the two things that I care most 
about, opportunity for quiet work, and for form- 
ing friendships that are worth while. I like too 
the smooth way in which everything runs, each 
person with her own allotted task. If I have no 
house of my own, I have two rooms which I love 
perhaps more than I should love a whole house. 
For there would be no room in a house of my own 
in which I should sit so much as I now sit in my 
study. So even if my house were as much to my 
satisfaction as is my study, it would not so sink 
into my soul. It is like Aurora Leigh's room, 
green 

" As green as any privet hedge a bird 
Might choose to build in," 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 47 

green paper, green rugs, cool and refreshing. 
And there are the books that I love, my Brown- 
ing, my Plato, my Shakespeare, my Goethe and all 
my history books. But of late I have taken more 
pleasure in my pictures than in my books. For 
I cannot enjoy books without taking time to do 
so (there is of course a certain pleasure in having 
them about me, but that can be gained from a 
limited number) ; moreover it is always possible 
to get them out of libraries. So I now confine 
myself in my purchases to the books that I must 
use as tools, and to a few pets. But my pictures 
I can sit and enjoy while I am entertaining guests, 
or when I am too tired to do anything; and even 
when I am too busy to really look at them, I take 
a sub-conscious joy in their presence. My almost 
life-sized Sistine draws me to her and gives me a 
share in her radiant uplift, my Botticelli's "In- 
coronata" sympathizes with me when I am sad, 
only like some dear friends who overpower me 
with their sympathy, there are times when her sad 
comprehension is more than I can bear, and then 
I turn my eyes from her. Andrea del Sarto's por- 
trait of himself and his wife reminds me of the 
great poem that it inspired, and constantly tells 
me that "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." 
My "Creation of Man" gives me Adam "fresh 
from God's hands, as his wife saw him," a body 
strong, perfect and pure such as God Himself 
could pronounce very good. If we all had such 
bodies, it would be easy to sing 



48 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

"How good is man's life, the mere living!" 

And there are other pictures, each one associated 
with something in my life which I wish to remem- 
ber. There is a statuette too, a copy of Riets- 
chel's Goethe and Schiller, to remind me of a per- 
fect summer that I passed in Weimar. And when 
I look out of my windows, there is the beautiful 
green world, and the glorious sunsets. 

But after all a woman's life does not consist 
in the things that she possesseth, even when these 
things are books and art treasures. Life con- 
sists in work and friends. We who lead this in- 
stitutional life have the work of course, and then 
what friends we do make ! I believe the conditions 
for friendship are better in institutional life than 
in any other kind of life which the world has^ 
known. And I have been blessed with colleagues 
whom to know has been a liberal education in many 
ways. How we love to gather around a tea-table 
together! There is a tea-room to which we go 
sometimes, which one of our number says reminds 
her of those old English taverns, where there was 
very little perhaps in the way of room or food, 
but so much in the way of high fellowship. Do 
we talk shop? Yes, sometimes, but then our shop 
is such an interesting one, and how could we tend 
it well and make it a big shop, unless we found it 
interesting enough to talk about? Do we talk 
about the girls? Yes, sometimes, for again if we 
did not talk about them, that would mean that we 
did not find them sufficiently interesting to talk 



THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 49 

about. I am sure I hope that they talk about us 
sometimes, I would rather they would even say un- 
favorable things about us than not talk about us 
at all. The problems of our little world are really 
very much the same as the problems of the big 
world, so it is as we understand our little problems 
that we are able to understand the bigger prob- 
lems of the bigger world. Great men are only 
ordinary men writ large ; we should study great 
men in order that we may understand the ordinary 
men with whom we have to deal ; should we not 
study ordinary men sometimes in order that we 
may understand great men ? And if we do live in 
a little world we will certainly never make it a big 
one by ignoring it, thinking it beneath us to talk 
about it. 

But we talk about a great many other things 
too. There are aspects of our work which cannot 
be called shop. And when the musicians talk 
about music, the artists about art, the teachers of 
literature about literature, the psychologists about 
psychology, I do not feel as though I were shut 
up in an institution, but rather as though I were 
out in the wide, wide world drawing in the breath 
of life. I am sure that no one of my colleagues 
attempts to teach me, yet each one of these rarely 
gifted women does teach me. And then we dis- 
cuss other matters which have no connection with 
our work. The affairs of the universe do not 
have time to get much awry, for we have straight- 
ened them out so often over our tea-cups. Like 



60 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

the clergy too we have a large fund of anecdotes, 
for both our acquaintances and our reading have 
been large and varied. And are we happy? I 
do not know any women who are happier. Doubt- 
less the married woman's life is higher and holier 
for the woman who is best fitted for it, but the 
teacher's life is higher and holier for the woman 
who is best fitted for it. After all is it really 
so much better to bring more people into the 
world, than to train those who are already in it, 
as we hope we are doing, to be a little better and 
a little happier? 

The objection that is sometimes made to our 
life is that it unfits us for any other. But does not 
any life tend to unfit for any other life? What 
middle-aged man or woman of any calling can 
make a violent change in manner of living with 
perfect equanimity? On the whole it seems best 
to lead the life which we have chosen, or which 
circumstances have chosen for us, as well as we 
can ; our main duty is to live that life, not to fit 
ourselves for another, which we shall probably 
never be called upon to live. And if our human 
interests are many and varied, we at least stand 
as good a chance of being able to accommodate 
ourselves to any changes that may come to us as 
do our brothers and sisters in other walks of life. 



IV 

THE ARTIST 

This morning I attended a Congregational 
church in Cambridge, and was much struck by a 
petition in the long prayer, wherein the clergy- 
man prayed for "all musicians and artists, that 
they may seek to use their influence aright." 
These words set me to thinking my own thoughts 
to such an extent that I am afraid I did not hear 
the rest of the prayer, nor any of the sermon. 
I do not know that I ever heard such a petition in 
church before, but it seemed to me right that musi- 
cians and artists of all kinds should be prayed for, 
and I wondered why clergymen did not pray for 
them oftener. We pray for all ministers and 
teachers, why not for the interpreters of truth, the 
creators of beauty .f* For beauty stirs in us a 
chord of wider and deeper vibration than does any 
purely intellectual quality, a real longing for the 
Infinite, so our artists should be in a peculiar 
sense servants of the Most High God, and there- 
fore especially to be prayed for, Ruskin's words 
came to me, "From day to day and strength to 
strength, build up indeed by art, by thought and 
by just will an Ecclesia of which it shall not be 
said, 'See what manner of stones are here, but see 

51 



52 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

what manner of men !' " It is significant to me 
that in building up that Ecclesia, art is placed be- 
fore either thought or just will. If art then is to 
be first agent in that structure, how important 
that its influence should be good! 

And yet I doubt whether the artist thinks about 
his influence, or ought to think about it. I am 
inclined to believe that just so far as he does think 
about it, his art will be bad, and his influence, in 
so far as he has any influence, will be bad also. 
For the world's great workers may be divided into 
two classes, — Reformers and Artists, and the dif- 
ference between them does not depend so much 
upon the form of work which they have chosen, as 
upon the spirit in which they approach that work. 
Thus the teacher may be either a reformer or an 
artist. She (to my mind the teacher is generally 
she) who thinks most about her pupils, about their 
needs, moral, mental and physical and seeks prin- 
cipally to adapt her teaching to those needs, I 
should class as a reformer. She who thinks most 
about the subject matter which she is teaching, 
and seeks to present it as well as she can, almost 
regardless of her pupils, I should class as an art- 
ist. Nor is the one necessarily a better teacher 
than the other. The former makes her students 
feel that she is interested first in them, in their 
merits and shortcomings, interested in the subject 
largely for their sakes, for the effect that it has 
upon them. The latter is at first chiefly interested 
in the subject, but eventually she becomes inter- 



THE ARTIST 53 

ested in the pupils for the subject's sake. Gradu- 
ally she becomes aware that what is dear to her is 
dear to some of them, and instantly there is a 
strong bond of sympathy; or she recognizes that 
what is dear to her is not dear to some of them, 
and she tries to create a liking, to arouse an en- 
thusiasm, not so much for their sakes, as for the 
sake of that which she loves. Even then she does 
not turn reformer; she does not adapt the subject 
to her pupils, but she tries to excel herself in her 
presentation of it, for she feels that if any one 
fails to share her enthusiasm, it must be because 
her presentation was faulty. Perhaps she never 
takes so strong a personal interest in her students 
as the reformer teacher does. I have sometimes 
thought that in her judgment of them she is kind- 
lier, but not so kind. Not being so much inter- 
ested in their individual moral and intellectual wel- 
fare, she is not so severe in her judgments of their 
shortcomings, but on the other hand she will not 
go so far out of her way to serve them, for her 
real devotion is to her subject, not to her pupils; 
one cannot serve two masters. In a sense she 
does love her students, but often it is in the sense 
in which Sir Henry Irving loved his audiences 
when he addressed himself to them as their loving 
friend. Yet she probably gives more to them as 
artist than she could give as reformer. For we 
must fulfill ourselves, not try to be somebody else, 
that is suicide. We are born reformers or artists, 
not made; it is the reformer's duty to see that he 



54 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

is a good reformer, the artist's duty to see that he 
is a good artist. 

Men are reformers then when their aim is to 
make the world, — their world, the men, women and 
children right around them — better, artists when 
they are intent on producing a perfect piece of 
work. It is the reformer who tries to influence 
people; that is, he delivers his message to those 
about him, and his care is first that it shall be a 
message that will help them, and second that he 
may put it in such form that they will hear it. 
But the artist is alone with his God ; in the secret 
place of the Most High he has seen a vision, and 
he strives to reproduce that vision perfectly, as 
he has seen it, "according to the pattern that was 
shown unto him in the mount," quite irrespective 
of men's attitude toward it. 

" And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master 

shall blame, 
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work 

for fame; 
But each for the joy of the working, and each in his 

separate star 
Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of things 

as they are." 

I think of these two classes of workers in connec- 
tion with Raphael's great picture "The Trans- 
figuration." The artist is in my mind on the 
mount where Christ is being transfigured; the re- 
former is below in the valley among those pos- 
sessed with unclean spirits, and unlike the apostles 



THE ARTIST 55 

who because of their unbelief could not cast them 
out, he with strong faith is constantly casting 
them out. Nor is the one greater than the other. 
To concentrate on perfection is in some sense 
higher, to deal with the numerous and immediate 
problems of life is in some sense broader, but both 
are needed, and each must follow his star. Of 
the reformer it may be said, "His servant doth 
continually serve Him," but the mission of the 
artist is not so much to serve Him directly, as to 
"see His face." Strong to reproduce the truth 
which has been revealed to him, to create his little 
portion of beauty, he comes more and more to 
understand Him who is the source of all truth, the 
fountain of all beauty, whom he may or may not 
call God. If his vision is a true one, and he re- 
produces it correctly, men perhaps of his own gen- 
eration, perhaps of a later generation, will gaze 
upon it and be influenced by it ; but he does not 
seek to influence, he seeks only to present per- 
fectly that which he has seen, heard and felt of the 
Word of Life. 

" And if some worthy spirit be pleased too, 

It shall some comfort breed, but not more will. 

But what if none? It cannot yet undo 
The love I bear unto this holy skill; 

Tliis is the thing that I was born to do, 
This is my scene, this part must I fulfill." 

For just as soon as the artist fixes his eye 
upon his audience, that is just as soon as he begins 
to think about his influence, he deteriorates as an 



56 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

artist. For then he must present not the ideally 
best thing, but the best thing that his audience is 
able to receive ; that is he must adapt his message 
to them, must make compromises, must in fact 
cease to be an artist, since the essence of art is the 
search after perfection. The reformer is con- 
stantly making compromises in order that he may 
influence people, and within certain limits it is 
right that he should. For he speaks to the men 
of his own generation ; he must influence them or 
count for nothing, so it is well that he should real- 
ize that "half a loaf is better than none." His 
work may be as enduring as that of the artist, but 
he is held in remembrance not because of the pre- 
cepts that he taught, but because of the changed 
lives of those who heard him. Through him they 
rose a step higher, and the gain which they made 
they passed on to all those who should come after. 
Most of us do not read Luther's teachings to-day, 
but we are all better because Luther taught. The 
great lawgiver of Israel, like all statesmen, was a 
reformer rather than an artist, therefore he made 
compromises. "For the hardness of your hearts 
he gave you this precept," and we have outgrown 
many of his precepts. Jesus Christ was more of 
an artist than of a reformer. He spoke for all 
time, presented the truth exactly as He saw it, 
made no compromises to his generation. There- 
fore, as is so often the case with artists, in his own 
lifetime his influence was not widespread, but we 
have outgrown nothing that He taught; all 



THE ARTIST 57 

through the ages the Comforter has been bringing 
to remembrance such portions of His teaching as 
the particular age has most needed. So perhaps 
it is best to pray not that the artist may seek to 
use his influence aright, but that he may seek to 
have a true vision, and be able to present clearly 
that which he has seen. 

For the truth of the vision, or at least its con- 
tinuance and deepening truth, and the ability to 
reproduce it, does depend upon the earnestness 
with which the artist seeks it. It is true that art- 
ists are born, not made, that the vision is a free 
gift. Therefore the true artist will not think of 
himself as having accomplished anything, but 
rather of the greatness of the glory that has been 
revealed to him; he can reverence his art without 
egotism, for his attitude is that of the priest ad- 
ministering the sacrament; he is but the medium 
through which spiritual power manifests itself, the 
greatness is not in him but through him. If he 
does not believe in a Power not himself that makes 
for righteousness, he certainly does believe in a 
Power not himself that makes for Truth and 
Beauty. Socrates with his demon, Joan of Arc 
with her voices, are only slight exaggerations of 
what all artists, nay, all who have achieved great 
things have felt. So the true artist does not so 
much throw himself into his art, as allow his art 
to impress itself upon him. "Speak, Lord, for 
thy servant heareth," that is the attitude. In 
that remarkable story "The Romance of Leonardo 



58 IN CA^IBRIDGE BACKS 

da Vinci," Merejkowski represents Raphael as say- 
ing, "When one thinks, everything goes wrong." 
I take this to mean that so long as the artist con- 
sciously thinks, that is so long as he and his 
thought are separated, he produces nothing that 
can be called art, for what is more antagonistic 
to art than unassimilated intellect? It is when 
the man becomes so one with his thought and so 
one Avith his will, that he seems to neither think 
nor will, that the heavenly vision comes to him, and 
later, under similar circvunstances, comes the power 
to express it. "Divest mind of e'en thought, 
and lo! God's unexpressed will dawns o'er it." But 
in the interval between the vision and its final em- 
bodiment in art, there must be periods in which 
intellect and will play their part, and play them 
very consciously. "It shall be given you in that 
hour what ye shall speak," what ye shall write, 
what ye shall sing, what ye shall paint, yes, but 
only as previous to that hour, intellect and will 
have done their work. Furthermore, later visions 
come only as the artist has faithfully presented 
those which have already been vouchsafed to him. 
Moreover I think it not too much to say that 
unless the artist's waking hours are rich and pure, 
he will in time cease to dream true dreams. For 
art cannot for any long time be separated from 
the life of which it is the embodiment ; if it would 
live it must be penetrated and transfigured by the 
breath of the artist's soul. Hence the artist must 
not only work but live, since as art is the inter- 



THE ARTIST 59 

pretation of life he only can be an artist who has 
life, and who has it more abundantly. All the ex- 
periences of life, its keenest joys and its bitterest 
sorrows, give richness, breadth and depth to art. 
He who refuses to drink the cup of either joy or 
sorrow has thereby put limitations upon his art ; 
neither the old-time Puritan nor the mere pleasure- 
seeker has any place in the highest Heaven of 
Truth and Beauty. Only sinful experiences 
should be shunned, for in the long run sin must 
deaden the fineness of any gift. Only the pure in 
heart shall see God. 

I would not, however, be understood to say that 
the artist has no right to use sinful experience as 
a subject for art. For after all his mission is not 
so much to give us Beauty in the ordinary sense 
of the word as to give us Truth, to give us Life. 
So the greatest artist does not give us the beauti- 
ful to the exclusion of the unbeautiful, nor the un- 
beautiful to the exclusion of the beautiful, nor 
even the moral to the exclusion of the immoral, 
but still less the immoral to the exclusion of the 
moral, for he who sees the whole cannot always 
be a poet of "sweetness and light," nor can he 
always dwell among the denizens of the dark. 
He is interested in life in every form in which 
it appears ; he, the secondary creator, finds no 
life really repulsive, even as God, the original 
creator, finds no life really repulsive. He will 
therefore bring earth's truly great ones before 
us, and investigate the source of their strength, 



60 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

but he will also present to us the lowest, the 
meanest and vilest, let them justify themselves 
from their own point of view, say everything 
that can conceivably be said in their favor. 
When the artist is himself pure with the artist's 
passion for truth, I believe that he may safely give 
us any vision that may come to him. And when 
he presents that which is really true, not just on 
the surface true, I have sufficient faith in life and 
in the Lord of life, to believe that it must tend not 
toward immorality and ugliness, but toward mor- 
ality and beauty. "So beautiful that it must be 
true" has its converse, "so true that it must be 
beautiful" and both propositions are true. 

It is said that Jenny Lind could not take the 
part of a bad character because she felt so out of 
sympathy with it. Sir Henry Irving seemed to 
prefer the villain's part, but will anyone say that 
his acting was productive of evil? For myself I 
can say that every time I saw Irving I came away 
feeling that on the one hand my sympathies had 
been enlarged, while on the other I had been made 
to pray more earnestly, "Lead me not into temp- 
tation." For he seemed to say to each one of 
us, his auditors, "Thou art the man," to make us 
feel that every man is contained in every other 
man, that, given the same circumstances, any one 
of us might have been the villain whose soul was 
being laid bare before us. So while we looked 
into the heart of the sinner, and came to love and 
to hope for him who after all was so like our- 



THE ARTIST 61 

selves, came to understand what it is to "hate 
sin, but love the sinner" (as children we were 
taught that that was what God did, but we didn't 
understand it then), we looked into our own hearts 
and said to ourselves, "Let him who thinketh he 
standeth take heed lest he fall." Yet I do not 
believe that Irving tried to teach a moral lesson ; 
he only tried to present truth, to make us know. 
But perfect knowledge means perfect love, — it 
means also perfect morality. 

I think then we may come to the conclusion 
that the artist's influence is best when he tries not 
to make his influence good, but to make his art 
good, and one of the ways to make his art good 
is to make his life good. Here he has a great 
struggle, for owing to the circumstances of his 
life, strong temptations must generally come to 
him, and owing to his own nature these tempta- 
tions must appeal to him with peculiar, almost 
irresistible force. For to be an artist at all it 
is necessary to have a stronger emotional and in 
some sense a stronger intellectual nature than 
other men have ; it is not necessary to have a 
stronger will. Given an excessive emotional and 
intellectual nature with an average or less than 
average will to control them, and moral ruin is 
almost inevitable. Yet the danger is greater to 
those who have the artist's temperament, and 
there are very many such, without the artist's 
ability. For the work itself is a safeguard ; some 
very emotional people feel that the only safe out- 



62 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

let for their emotional nature is in art, partly be- 
cause the emotionalism which finds an outlet in 
that way may not demand other and more dan- 
gerous outlets, partly because the work takes 
time, and while one is working one cannot be ac- 
tively sinning. Moreover the artist frequently 
realizes that he cannot sin in such a way as to 
incapacitate himself for work, so for art's sake, 
if not for morality's sake, he sanctifies himself. 
For while it is probably true that it is impossible 
to be an artist at all except as one has a nature 
peculiarly susceptible to temptation, it is also 
true that he who constantly yields to temptation 
will injure or ruin his art. To be an artist then 
it is necessary that one be tempted, to continue 
an artist it is necessary that one resist tempta- 
tion. But after all is there not the same necessity 
in order to be and to continue to be a man? 

Then too the artist's difficulty often comes from 
the fact that to him the boundary between right 
and wrong is not so rigid as to other people. 
Seeking to understand life, he sees so much good 
beneath the evil, and so much evil beneath the 
good, that he is likely to lose his bearings. Of 
course the truest and best balanced artist, like the 
truest and best balanced man, only learns from 
this so far as his own life is concerned to avoid the 
evil in the good, and so far as his judgments of 
others are concerned to be more hopeful and more 
charitable, since there is so much good in the evil. 
But to one who is not perfectly balanced, the 



THE ARTIST 63 

temptation is to ask "What is good?" as Pilate 
asked "What is truth ?" perhaps at first earnestly, 
even in agony, but later scornfully. In a certain 
sense too it is necessary that the artist should 
have no fixed opinions, in order that his mind may 
be open to all new impressions. He must divest 
himself of all prejudices, and if he retains tra- 
ditions, it must be because he is able to make 
them something more than traditions. He must 
not put himself in the position of having to con- 
tend for definition, for once let a man adopt a 
definition, and all growth in that direction stops. 
The rest of his life is spent in contending for 
definition, just as in the case of the adoption of 
a complicated religious creed, the strength which 
might have gone toward developing a rich spirit- 
ual life, goes toward defending the creed. It is 
the artist's ambition to die learning. But in this 
tolerance of definition of right and wrong, there 
is of course danger of coming to the conclusion, 
practical if not theoretical, that there is no right 
or wrong. Even when the changing impressions 
to which the artist is and must be subjected do 
not mean moral ruin, they often mean life-long 
ineffectualness, for it is difficult for him who sees 
good in everything to be able to determine where 
the greater good lies. Hence there is much truth 
in the saying "One must see to know, be blind to 
act." 

Moreover the very fact that the artist's work 
lies in the ideal world tends to unfit him to live 



64. IN CAMBRroGE BACKS 

in the real world. The emotions of art have, it is 
true, the advantage of harmlessness over the 
emotions of life, but at the same time they lack 
the bracing qualities which real joys and real 
sorrows bring with them. He who has 

" let his feelings run in soft luxurious flow 
Shrinks when hard service must be done, and faints at 
every blow." 

To the mind which has been drugged with bar- 
ren feeling, and some artists do thus drug their 
minds, real life seems unprofitable and common- 
place, its everyday friction intolerable. That is 
one reason why the artist is so often irritable 
over little things, he is "ein Mai in Himmel und 
das nachste Mai in Keller" ; when he does descend 
to earth, he actually goes beneath the earth. 

But there is frequently a bitterness about the 
artist that lies deeper than petty irritability, the 
bitterness which artists too often feel toward each 
other. This, however, is not confined to artists. 
A friend once said to me of a very sweet young 
girl "She is so uniformly sweet, because she has 
nothing of the spirit of the reformer in her." 
And when I read the history of the movement 
which we have agreed to call pre-eminently the 
Reformation, just as Mrs. Poyser said "Women 
are mostly foolish, the Lord Almighty made them 
to match the men," so I am inclined to say "Re- 
formers mostly hate each other, the Lord Al- 
mighty made them to match the artists." Nor 



THE ARTIST 65 

is the reason far to seek in either case. Earnest 
men with a message, whether artists or reformers, 
are so sure that their truth is truth, that their 
message is the right message, that they cannot 
bear that anyone should deliver a false message, 
or that the world should receive it. It is almost 
St. Paul's feeling when he wrote, "If we or an 
angel from heaven should preach any other doc- 
trine to you from that which ye have received, let 
him be anathema." The great artist or the great 
reformer may have grace to see that his message 
and the other are both true, and that instead of 
being antagonistic, they are complementary ; or 
that if the other message be nothing, it will come 
to naught, but that if it be of God, he cannot 
overthrow it; but few men, whether artists or re- 
formers, are great in all respects. Where the 
artist's bitterness is really jealousy (it is often 
falsely so-called) it does not arise from the fact 
that he is an artist, but from the fact that he is 
a man with considerable of the old Adam in him. 
Indeed it is to be attributed not to the artist in 
him, but to his failure to be completely an artist : 
that is, to the fact that he cares not so much about 
art as about reputation. 

Art too tends to separate the artist from other 
men, because though in one sense it broadens his 
sympathies, in another sense it frequently nar- 
rows them. For while the artist sympathizes 
with both the good and the evil, the beautiful and 
the hideous, it is difficult for him to feel an in- 



66 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

terest in the mediocre and the commonplace, 
which generally expresses itself in the conven- 
tional. The man whose morality is conventional, 
or whose religion expresses itself in conventional 
forms, does not seem sincere to him. That is one 
reason why the artist, even the artist with a deeply 
religious nature, frequently does not like church 
services. He whose whole business it is to pene- 
trate into the truth of things, to find proper ex- 
pression for the truth which he sees, feels that 
conventional morality, conventional religion, the 
ordinary church services do not ring true. Bad 
taste itself is something that is not true ; services 
are in bad taste when they are not true expres- 
sions of the heart. But does not the artist some- 
times interpret failure to express, which after all 
comes with practice, to mean failure to feel and 
to know.'' Of course we do not feel and know 
quite clearly, until we are able to express that 
which we feel and know. We clarify the feeling 
by expressing it, and yet we may feel truly and 
deeply without feeling clearly. Even "frothing 
spume and frequent sputter," sometimes "prove 
that the soul's depths boil in earnest," though 
the frothing spume and frequent sputter do not 
seem the fitting expression for it. 

Perhaps the artist's impatience with the medio- 
cre and the commonplace arises from his not being 
artist enough; for while on the one hand he lives 
too exclusively in the spiritual, that is in the 
ideal world, on the other hand he is often too 



THE ARTIST 67 

materialistic, or at least too sensuous ; he becomes 
too dependent upon the senses, that only is beau- 
tiful to him which appeals to his senses, sound, 
form, color, verbal beauty of expression and so 
forth. But if he could only see beneath the sur- 
face, he might find that beautiful and interesting 
whose outward manifestation is very common- 
place. Mr. Browning has been criticized because 
he makes Pippa, a simple silk-winding girl, talk 
like a female Paracelsus, Tresham when he has to 
tell Mildred that he has killed her lover, stop to 
remind her how as children they had gathered 
water-lilies together, Paracelsus utter a profound 
speech several hundred lines long, and then in- 
stantly expire. But Browning himself answers 
this criticism when in his essay on Shelley, he says 
that it is the poet's business to see "not what man 
sees, but what God sees." It is true that Pippa, 
Tresham and Paracelsus would not, had they been 
in the flesh, have spoken as Browning makes them 
speak; he puts into their mouths not what they 
would have said, not perhaps what they would 
even have consciously thought, but what perhaps 
unconsciously to themselves, God saw that they 
were trying to say, were trying to think. 

" Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped. 
All I could never be, 
All men ignored in me. 

This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
shaped." 



68 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

We dumb children of earth do have many strug- 
gling, incoherent thoughts for which no one gives 
us credit, for which we do not give ourselves 
credit, because we cannot express them. It is the 
artist's business to say for us that which we long 
to say, and cannot. 

While in a deep and broad sense the artist 
generally understands people better than they 
understand themselves, this understanding does 
not always help him to adapt himself to them, so 
he does not get the credit for it. He often holds 
himself aloof from people, or is silent when he is 
with them, frequently seems unable to adapt him- 
self to general conversation, is occasionally lack- 
ing in tact. Because of this lack of adaptability, 
he who makes experiencing, reflecting upon and 
expressing experiences, the business of life is con- 
stantly being told that he is lacking in experi- 
ence. And doubtless there is a real truth in this ; 
he seeks experience a little too eagerly to find it. 
For when a man is very much absorbed in experi- 
encing, he cannot be absorbed in experiences. 
The consciousness that he is experiencing becomes 
stronger than the experience. He whose main 
business it is to understand life often in some 
measure foregoes living. "When one becomes too 
deeply absorbed in the midst of things," Goethe 
says, "it is impossible to think about their begin- 
ning and end." When Goethe was a very young 
man he asked his friend Behrisch what experience 
was, and was told that "Experience is properly 



THE ARTIST 69 

what an experienced man experiences in experi- 
encing his experiences." That is the kind of ex- 
perience that the artist is likely to get, an experi- 
ence of experience. For he holds himself aloof 
from things in order that he may see whence they 
come and whither they go, without being too much 
occupied by details. He mingles with the real 
world chiefly in order that he may people his ideal 
world. While his intense internal activity does 
not destroy perception, he frequently perceives 
only that he may conceive. In conversation 
therefore he often betrays a lack of that instinct- 
ive sympathy which is the cement of good society. 
Too much is going on in his own mind for him 
to be very sensitive to what is going on in other 
people's minds. With him thought cannot yield 
even to sympathy. Goethe tells us that he often 
thought of his companion as though he were his 
portrait ; he neither spoke nor listened, but he con- 
sidered him as a picture, as a whole, especially as 
regarded himself and his relations to him, so too 
great interest in the whole man excluded all in- 
terest in the partial man. But men wish their 
companions to be interested in the partial selves 
which they are striving at the time to reveal, not 
in the whole selves which they either do not know, 
or if they do know, they wish to conceal. 

It seems almost a contradiction after this to 
say that the artist is held aloof from society 
partly by an over-sensitive nature, and yet this 
is true. For to be an artist it is necessary to be 



70 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

very impressionable, and the impressionable man 
is almost always the sensitive man. The sensitive 
man shrinks from companionship that is foreign 
to his nature ; he must have full fellowship or 
none. Thus Goethe says of Stilling that where 
he was not known, he was silent, where he was 
known and not loved, he was sad. 

But just in proportion as the artist shrinks 
from mere acquaintances, so much the more does 
he desire real companionship, the companionship 
that means absolute trust, absolute sympathy. 
It is not good for a man to be alone in the ideal 
world any more than in the real world ; indeed in 
the ideal world the loneliness is more intense, for 
the more that there is to share, the greater the 
need of sharing it. George Eliot says that it is 
difficult to create, except as one has the assurance 
that what is infinitely dear to one's self is infinitely 
dear to some one else; she attributed her success 
in authorship to her association with George 
Henry Lewes. And if in his creative moments 
the artist needs the stimulus of love, equally in 
moments of exhaustion, and nothing exhausts as 
art does, does he need love and sympathy upon 
which to rest. Then because the artist is and 
must be a most impressionable person, with vary- 
ing and contradictory impressions and emotions, 
he needs some one to quiet his restless spirit, to 
assure him that there are some things which are 
fixed and constant. I find this need best ex- 
pressed in the life of Jenny Lind where it is said 



THE ARTIST 71 

of her, "She needed a strong and steady per- 
sonal influence at the back of her life, to calm 
her agitation, to control her uncertainties, to 
abide constant throughout her reactions, to dissi- 
pate her suspicions, to fix her emotions, to anchor 
her conscience. She had all the fervors and the 
lapses, the starts and the recoils of a dramatic 
genius ; and firm and high as was her moral ideal, 
its very force brought it into confused collision 
with the bewilderment of circumstances, and it 
was as liable to perplex and distress her as to 
cheer and impel. This made her passionately feel 
for something which could from without buttress 
and reassure her spiritual intentions. Shaken as 
she herself often was by the strong emotions which 
swept across her soul, she needed an external 
mark, a sign, a symbol of the unshaken security 
of the moral end in which she trusted. Someone 
ought to be near at hand to assure her that all 
was well, that her belief in goodness had not 
played her false." ^ 

While many artists have been ideally mated, 
they seem more likely to be successful in friend- 
ship than in marriage, probably because in friend- 
ship there is less need for contact with the details 
of the real world than in marriage. Goethe has 
put into words what many an artist has felt about 
his friends. He tells us that he gathered about 
him in Weimar a circle of wise men who "con- 

1 Holland and Rockstro "Jenny Lind, The Artist." 



72 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

stituted for him a home." His friendships were 
in every case founded upon the "religious senti- 
ments, intellectual sympathies, the affairs of the 
heart which are imperishable" ; he loved his friends 
because they "helped him to good thoughts." 
Where he found the intellectual and spiritual 
sympathy which he craved, he threw aside all re- 
serve; his one desire was to turn himself inside 
out, that his friend might comprehend his spirit's 
life. Of his first intellectual friendship, that with 
Jacobi, he says "Such a relationship was new to 
me, and excited a passionate longing for further 
communion. At night, after we had parted and 
retired to our chambers, I often sought him again. 
With the moonlight streaming over the broad 
Rhine, we stood at the window and revelled in the 
full interchange of ideas, which in such splendid 
moments of confidence swell forth so abundantly." 
But Goethe's supreme friendship was that with 
Schiller, and the beauty of this connection, he 
says, lay in the fact that they found the strongest 
bond of union in their exertions to reach a common 
aim, and "had no need for what is ordinarily called 
friendship." The desire to determine whether he 
or his friend wrote certain lines, he denounced as 
Philistine, "As if it were of any importance to 
determine which of us wrote them ! Friends such 
as we were, intimate for years, in habits of daily 
intercourse, live so truly in one another that it 
is hardly possible to determine whether single 
thoughts belong to one or to the other." 



THE ARTIST 73 

In my essay on friendship I dwelt upon the 
danger that an emotional friendship may be the 
enemy of work. I cannot feel that in the case of 
the real artist there is much danger that work 
will suffer because of love ; his love will rather be- 
come material with which to feed his art ; he will 
work because he loves, and love because he works. 
Every poet lover or friend can sing 

" O danke nicht fiir diese Lieder, 
Mir ziemt es dankbar dir zu sein. 
Du gabst sie mir, ich gebe wieder. 
Was jetzt und einst und ewig dein." 

The danger is not that the artist's work may 
suffer because of his love, but that his love may 
suffer because of his work. The artist more than 
other men craves love and sympathy, but he fre- 
quently craves them selfishly ; he demands more 
than he can possibly give ; he is too much wrapped 
up in his own life and work to give as much as he 
gets, nor does he realize that the sympathy which 
he constantly demands takes strength. Did 
Jacobi also seek Goethe at midnight, I wonder? 
was it as much of a joy to him to give sympathy 
as it was to Goethe to receive it? or was he dis- 
turbed by being kept up late at night? Did he 
too pour out his soul to Goethe, and did he get as 
much sympathy as he gave? or when he tried it 
did he find Goethe so absorbed in his own 
thoughts, that he came to the conclusion that his 
function must be to listen, to give sympathy, not 



74 IN CA]\IBRIDGE BACKS 

to expect it in return? Is the artist's love an un- 
selfish devotion which desires to make sacrifices 
for the sake of the beloved? Gifts he probably 
will lavish if he can, for they minister to the sa- 
cred fire of his love, and for his work's sake it is 
necessary that he should not outgrow his love, for 
it is his love that gives life to his work. But is 
he not in danger of looking upon his love as simply 
material for and stimulus to art? 

" And love me, love me, little one, 

That I of bliss may sing; 
Then leave me, that with tears and woe. 

My mournful song may ring. 
And die ! My song must know death too, 

And what its sorrows are. 
That it may know despair's true ring; 

Die then ! I am Cobzar ! " 

The test in the artist's case is not does he work 
better because he loves, he could hardly help doing 
that, but could he give up his work because he 
loves? Yet we must not ask too much of him, for 
what man could give up his life's work for love's 
sake? There is a sense in which to almost every 
man work comes, and perhaps should come before 
love. He can bear his wife's death with more 
equanimity than he can the permanent giving up 
of his work, and even interruptions are almost in- 
tolerable. A woman's work is ordinarily to care 
for those whom she loves, to make them comfort- 
able in direct personal ways ; hence what seem like 
constant interruptions are not real interruptions, 



THE ARTIST 75 

but a part of her work ; she fulfills her life best by 
submitting to them, but generally speaking the 
man who allows himself to be interrupted is to be 
blamed. We do not find fault with the man be- 
cause he does not fill the woman's place, nor with 
the woman because she does not fill the man's place. 
So perhaps we should not require of the artist that 
he give us all that he has to give, and then all 
that he would have to give if he were not an artist. 
The greatest artists have probably been all-round 
men, but we cannot all be greatest. Some other 
things must generally be sacrificed to success in 
art, but let the artist understand that he sacri- 
fices them, not because the artist's life is more 
important than other men's lives, but because it 
is his life, and every man must follow his own 
star ; and let him not demand of others sacrifices 
which he would not be willing to make for them. 
In art, as in everything else, true greatness lies 
in balance, in being able to see proportions. 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 

In connection with my meditations upon the 
artist, I have thought often of the study of an 
artistic temperament which Mr. Barrie has given 
us in "Sentimental Tommy" and "Tommy and 
Grizel." Tommy, it will be remembered, was the 
child of a masterful man and an imaginative wo- 
man. All through his childhood he was troubled 
by the fact that there seemed to be so many people 
within him. When he grew to man's estate he 
was very shy of the ladies, and yet he wrote a 
book on woman which proved to be the book of 
the day. So the ladies united to adore him; it 
was suggested that his wisdom on the subject of 
the gentler sex was due to the fact that he had 
loved a beautiful girl who had died. Tommy him- 
self accepted the suggestion, called his dead lady- 
love Mildred, and almost came to believe that she 
had really existed. 

After this he made love to all the ladies whom 
he met just to see how it felt to be making love. 
Then he returned to Thrums, his boyhood's home, 
and his old playmate Grizel, the Painted Lady's 
daughter, was disappointed because she could not 
respect him. So he made up his mind that she 

76 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 77 

should respect him, and in an heroic sentimental 
mood he rescued a boy from drowning. After 
this he began to think that Grizcl loved him, 
therefore he made most Aaolent love to her, and 
she, who had always wanted to love him, but had 
not permitted herself to do so until she was sure 
that he wanted her to, now gave herself wholly to 
the joy of loving. Then the artist in Tommy 
rebelled against marriage with the commonplace 
duties that it would bring with it, and at last he 
had to tell Grizel so. Later the broken-hearted 
Grizel hears him make love to Lady Pippinworth, 
a married woman whom at heart he despises, but 
whose proud scornfulness he wishes to subdue. 
The result is that she loses her mind temporarily, 
and Tommy, overcome by remorse and affection 
(affection, not love) marries her in her insanity 
and takes care of her most tenderly for eighteen 
months until her mind returns to her. Yet with 
all his striving he could not really change him- 
self. "They say that we always can when we try 
hard enough," Mr. Barrie says, "so I suppose that 
Tommy did not try hard enough." In the end he 
dies most ignominiously, strangled by his great 
coat, which caught on a nail in the garden wall 
that he was endeavoring to scale in order to get 
to Lady Pippinworth. And Grizel, who knew all, 
thought it all out calmly for herself, and to her 
latest breath continued to love Tommy just the 
same. And when Mr, Barrie speculates as to 
why Grizel loved Tommy, Grizel who saw through 



78 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

him so well, and who demanded so much of men, he 
remembers the look that was wont to come into 
her face when she bent over a little child. And 
he sums up Tommy's whole character when he 
says, "I see that all that was wrong with him was 
that he could not always be a boy." That is the 
keynote to Tommy's failings, and because I be- 
lieve it to be the keynote of many an artist's fail- 
ings, I have been led to make a special study of 
him. 

From morning to night the child lives in a 
world of illusions ; his whole life consists in play- 
ing that people and things are not what they are. 
The pleasure of the game does not even consist 
in playing that they are better and grander than 
they are; it is sufficient that they should be differ- 
ent from what they are. "Have a different name 
from your real name," said a child of three, "be- 
cause it isn't any fun to have the same name that 
you really have." Because this world of illusions 
may be entered without money and without price, 
the children of the hovel are as happy as the chil- 
dren of the palace. 

In this realm of the imagination the artist 
lives to the close of his life. We all of us when 
we are children dream of Thrums ; but compara- 
tively few of us even as children can put our 
dreams into words, and after awhile we cease even 
to dream. The artist is the child who becomes 
more and more of a child as the years go on, 
with more and more power to make the rest of us 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAJVIENT 79 

children. Dreaming more vividly every year, he 
gains more and more power to express his dreams. 
More and more is he able to carry us back to the 
days when we dreamed ourselves. 

To this grown-up child too it is not necessary 
that things be better and grander than they are 
in order that they may be interesting. The one 
essential to him too is that they be different. 
"This is my birthday," writes Sonya Kovalevsky 
in her diary, "and I am thirty-one years old." In 
a footnote her biographer says "It was not her 
birthday, and that was not her age." The 
youthful Shelley was in the habit of writing let- 
ters to people under assumed names. The young 
Goethe loved to go about the country incognito, 
and this too before he had attained a reputation 
which might subject him to inconvenience in 
traveling. There was no object in it. It was 
simply that he might be something that he was 
not ; that he might continue the game, which he 
had begun as a child. 

To the perfect actor the play is much more 
real than the reality. "I am sorry that you felt 
so badly," said the little girl to the big brother, 
who by an oratorical effort had moved some of 
his audience to tears. "I didn't feel badl}^" was 
the indignant reply, "I only wanted to make other 
people feel badly." That boy was not a perfect 
artist. The perfect artist feels badly himself, or 
thinks that he does. Indeed perhaps the only 
criterion by which the supreme artist can dis- 



80 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

tinguish between the world of his imagination, 
and the world of sense, is in the fact that the 
former is more real to him than the latter. 
Wordsworth had, at times, to convince himself of 
the existence of the external world by clasping 
a tree or anything else that happened to be near 
him. Shelley had a period in which he doubted 
the existence of the You. 

But it is not only the existence of the You that 
is doubtful. The existence of the I is even more 
dubious. There is not one of the various selves 
that the child or the artist imagines himself to be, 
that is not more real than the one self that ap- 
pears to the world. "There is a deal of Hart- 
leys," said the five-year-old Hartley Coleridge r 
"there is Picture Hartley, and Shadow Hartley, 
and there's Echo Hartley, and there's Catch-me- 
fast Hartley." And there is a "deal" of persons 
in every child. The difference is that the deal of 
Hartleys and of Tommies are persistent. Char- 
acter-formation is a narrowing as well as a deep- 
ening process. We all of us probably have at the 
beginning the material for more than one person. 
Training, environment, the force of our own will, 
determine which one of the numerous persons that 
are born in us shall prevail. That one gradually 
destroys the others, and strengthens himself. 
Experience we say is broadening. Perhaps it 
would be just as correct to say that it is narrow- 
ing. For to have experienced one thing very 
deeply, so deeply that it has become part and 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERA^IENT 81 

parcel of the being, a motive-force in the life, 
shuts out the possibility of experiencing certain 
other things. 

The true Tommy refuses to experience anything 
in such a way as to exclude the possibility of any 
other experience. He "lives with the world's 
life," not so much because he has "renounced his 
own," as because he has no life of his own to re- 
nounce. With abounding child-life, he has no 
grown-up life in order that he may be free to live 
in turn the grown-up lives of every one of the rest 
of us. And because he lives not one life but many, 
he understands the lives of every one of us better 
than we understand them ourselves. He under- 
stands the individual life, because he understands 
life itself. We say that it is through experience 
that we come to know life. But experience often 
closes the eyes to the deeper meaning of life. 

Not that the man of artistic temperament does 
not feel. On the contrary, he feels much more 
violently than other men do, just as the child 
feels more violently than the man. There is no 
joy equal to the violent joy of the child. Nor is 
there any despair equal to the despair of the im- 
aginative child. For the child who is very much 
a child, self-control in either joy or sorrow, is al- 
most or quite an impossibility. The man knows 
that nothing is important enough to lose himself 
over. But if the child's feeling is more violent 
than the man's, it is less intense and less lasting. 

The greater violence and the shorter duration 



82 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

of the child's emotion spring from the same cause. 
He is violent, because for the time being he gives 
himself wholly to one feeling. There is no other 
to interfere with, or modify it. But the emotion 
does not last, because just as soon as another 
emotion arises, it takes complete possession, even 
as the former did. In the child's case, the former 
disappears. In the case of the artist pure and 
simple, it remains to be enshrined as a work of art. 
In a sense he continues to feel it always, but it 
is no longer the original feeling that predomi- 
nates. It is rather the feeling that he has felt. 
In the artist's case, as in the child's, this often 
gets the better of the real feeling even while the 
real feeling lasts. I have sometimes wondered 
whether it was altogether because of the inade- 
quacy of language, that Tennyson "sometimes 
held it half a sin, to put in words the grief he 
felt." Did not the sin lie partly in the fact that 
in clothing grief in beautiful words, admiration 
for the sorrow became stronger than the sorrow 
itself.? Yet to be very conscious that one is feel- 
ing, even to get so far as not to be able to dis- 
tinguish between the real feeling and the con- 
sciousness of it, does not exclude real feeling. 

The child enjoys all his plays, the sad ones as 
well as the glad ones, indeed the sad ones often 
more than the glad ones. So the man of genius 
enjoys all his plays, and the sorrowful ones more 
than the happy ones. There is such a romance 
about a forlorn existence. There is such a su- 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAJVfENT 83 

periority about the suffering man. Stern 
Thomas Carlyle, who wrapped himself about with 
melancholy, as with a garment, speaks of a "kind 
of imperial sorrow that is almost like felicity. 
So completely and composedly wretched, one is 
equal to the very gods." "I have heartily en- 
joyed," says Goethe, "a genuine experience of 
the variegated throng and press of the world: 
Sorrow, Hope, Love, Works, Wants, Adventure, 
Ennui, Impatience, Folly, Joy, the Expected and 
the Unknown, the Superficial and the Profound." 
He had enjoyed all, and of them all he places 
Sorrow first. Denied Lotte's love, he gave him- 
self up for a time, to the pleasures of melancholy. 
He had a dagger which he does not forget to say 
was very handsome. This he placed by his bed- 
side every night, and before extinguishing his 
candle, he made various attempts to pierce the 
sharp point a couple of inches into his breast. 
But not being able to do it, he laughed himself 
out of the notion, and decided to live. Tommy, 
denied the luxury of unrequited love, must needs 
write a book on the subject. And he was never 
so happy as when contemplating his own early 
death. 

Joy and Sorrow in the abstract impress the 
child, and the child-man more than joy and sor- 
row in the concrete. The thought of Death in 
the abstract is uplifting and ennobling, something 
to be dwelt upon. Death in the concrete is some- 
thing to be banished from the mind. A four- 



84 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

year-old girl, who had heard of a mother who had 
lost her child, said to her own mother, "Does she 
ever laugh now?" Being told that she did, she 
said in a shocked voice, "Mother! how can she?" 
Yet if the dead child had been in her own house, 
there is no doubt that she would have been inter- 
ested in her play long before the funeral. The 
impression which the abstract makes upon the 
mind is at the same time deeper and less deep 
than that made by the concrete. It is more awe- 
inspiring, but less life-determining. 

The loves of the poets have generally been 
numerous. Why is it that they who enshrine 
love for us, are themselves such inconstant lovers? 
Is it because love-making is for them just the most 
delightful of all plays? Like all the other plays, 
it is very real while it lasts. And it is as far re- 
moved from intentional cruelty as any play could 
possibly be. If only every one had understood 
with Corp that Tommy's love-making was "just 
another o' his plays," no harm would have been 
done by it. 

With marriage the play ends. The realities of 
life, from which the artist shrinks, crowd upon him 
as never before. It becomes less and less possible 
to live so exclusively in the spirit. When Levine 
in "Anna Karenina" looked forward to the bliss of 
married life, he did not take into consideration 
the fact that his wife must work. The realization 
of this was for a time a considerable drawback to 
his happiness. 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 85 

The progress of the lover in Plato's Symposium 
is from the concrete to the abstract. From love 
of the beautiful in his beloved, he passes onward 
to the love of Beauty Absolute. But the prog- 
ress of the artist-lover is from the abstract to the 
concrete. He loves his mistress because he thinks 
he sees in her the concrete form in which the Ab- 
solute Beauty, whose he is, and whom he serves, 
embodies itself. As Emerson would say, it is not 
the beloved one whom he loves, but her radiance. 
Coming too close to her, the radiance is dispelled. 

For such a nature an unrequited love is more 
lasting than love requited. So long as there is 
hope the game continues. And there is more 
pleasure in struggle than in possession. "Man 
loves to conquer," says Goethe, "likes not to feel 
secure." When all hope is gone, the pleasures of 
melancholy remain, and for the head of the be- 
loved there is an immortal halo. The pain of 
disenchantment can never come to the lover. 
Beatrice, the mistress of Dante's home, would 
probably have become prosaic, tiresome, even ir- 
ritating. Beatrice, the unattained and unat- 
tainable, was to the poet life below and star 
above. 

The child does not originate his games. They 
are all suggested to him. He merely adopts and 
elaborates. He plays that he is someone whom 
he knows, someone of whom he has heard. So 
with Tommy. He did not originate Mildred. 
She was suggested to him. He did not even orig- 



86 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

inate his own nobility of character. That too 
was a suggestion. When the child Tommy spent 
a shilling for a picture for his mother, it was that 
he might give her pleasure. It was after she 
praised his nobility that he discovered that "there 
ain't many as noble as I is." The man Tommy, 
who had reasoned the boy from drowning, "lay on 
his face shivering, not from cold, not from shock, 
but in a horror of himself. It was not water that 
he tried to shake fiercely from him when he rose; 
it was the monstrous part of him that had done 
this deed." It was when Crrizel admired his hero- 
ism and modesty that he again admired him- 
self. As it was easy to make him believe himself 
noble, so too it was easy to make him believe him- 
self base. He was always ill at ease and self- 
distrustful with people who did not admire him. 

Originality, we are accustomed to say, is the 
mark of genius. But perhaps it would be as true 
to say that the man of genius is the least original 
of all men. He is the impressionable man, the 
man whose soul lies open to all impressions, as the 
child's soul does, the man who can combine these 
impressions, and then impress them back upon 
those who have impressed them upon him. He is 
but the medium, through whom all men find ut- 
terance, voiceless men as well as those with 
voices. 

Where it is so difficult to distinguish between 
the internal and the external world, where per- 
sonal identity even is so uncertain, it is not pos- 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 87 

sible that the line between truth and falsehood 
should be sharply drawn. There is no deliberate 
deception. It is the artist himself who is de- 
ceived. "One lies more to one's self than to any 
one else," Byron wrote in his diary. And that is 
what makes the case almost hopeless. For the 
lying to one's self is unconscious. Conscious ly- 
ing may be corrected. But how correct uncon- 
scious lying.'' "I don't know what my Heavenly 
Father is going to do about me," said the four- 
year-old, who had been reproved for what his par- 
ents considered too active an imagination. "I tell 
so many stories, I suppose my Heavenly Father 
will have to put a stop to it somehow. But I 
don't see how He is going to begin." Yes, that 
is the trouble. How put a stop to Tommy's 
story-telling, without clipping his wings .'^ And 
is it possible to clip his wings, even if it be de- 
sirable ? 

In the world of illusions in which the child lives, 
he is himself the central figure. For him, and by 
him, this world has been created. He has indeed 
created it for his own glory. And that part of 
the external world which he knows exists almost 
as much for him, as does his own internal world. 
For him his father earns money ; for him his 
mother toils. God, he is told, has made the world 
so beautiful, in order that he may be happy. 
Thus every child is an egotist. 

The discipline of life takes the egotism of child- 
hood out of many men, but rarely out of the art- 



88 IN CAMBRroGE BACKS 

ist. For while other men succeed largely in pro- 
portion to their ability to repress themselves, the 
artist succeeds in proportion to his ability to ex- 
press himself. "Obliterate yourself," was Pym's 
advice to Tommy. But the artist who really ob- 
literated himself would be an absolute failure. 
For the artist has nothing to give the world but 
himself, and succeeds just in proportion as he is 
able to give himself. It is the writer who brings 
his reader into closest contact with himself who 
writes for all time. To do this, it is necessary 
not exactly that he think about himself, but that 
he completely identify himself with the objects of 
thought. Scherer says of Byron, "He has 
treated hardly any subject but one, himself," 
while Scott maintains of the same author that "he 
has embraced every topic of human life, and 
sounded everything on the divine harp, from its 
slightest to its most powerful and heart-astound- 
ing tones." Are not both statements true, and 
true not only of Byron, but of every writer who 
can be called great .f^ For the great writer is he 
who understands and writes of every topic of hu- 
man life, every passion of the human heart, and 
at the same time imparts his own personality to 
all that he writes. 

To the making of an artist, both society and 
solitude are necessary, society in which to ob- 
serve the lives of others, solitude in which to dis- 
cover the motive-power of those lives. To do the 
latter it is necessary to put one's self in every- 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 89 

body else's place and then to commune with one's 
own heart. 

The proportion in which society and solitude 
should mingle vary with the nature of the genius. 
To Shakespeare, one fancies that society was more 
necessary than to Goethe. To Goethe, solitude 
was probably more essential than to Shakespeare. 
For Shakespeare presents men, Goethe thinks 
about them, and through them. Shakespeare is 
the seer, Goethe the thinker. Not that Shakes- 
peare thinks less than Goethe does, but he thinks 
less consciously and makes his reader less con- 
scious of his thinking. With him seeing and 
thinking are one thing. There are times when, 
to detect at first reading that Shakespeare is 
thinking, one has to be almost as quick as Shakes- 
peare himself. 

Goethe went much into society, but one im- 
agines that it was always "as the gods, apart." 
One is sure that Shakespeare was a "good fellow." 
There is a certain remoteness about Goethe's 
writings, which we feel is a reflection of the re- 
moteness of his character. He is further from the 
world of men and women than Shakespeare, and 
yet nearer to it. Every character in Shakes- 
peare is someone whom the reader has seen, or 
at least someone whom he is sure that Shakes- 
peare had seen. Every character in Goethe is the 
imaginative reader's self, the remote idealized self 
of whom every dreamer dreams. 

Tommy in his character, and we fancy in this 



90 IN CMIBRIDGE BACKS 

respect in his writings, belongs to the school of 
Goethe rather than to that of Shakespeare. It 
is to be observed that it is only the imaginative 
reader who identifies every creation of Goethe and 
of Tommy with the self. Grizel half hoped that 
Tommy's woman was not the real woman, for if 
she were, then she, Grizel was even less than an 
average woman. But Grizel was not imaginative. 

It is this egotism of the artist that makes so- 
ciety difficult for him. Even as a child Tommy 
was not one with the children with whom he played. 
They were all more or less his puppets. As a 
man he was awkward and shy in society, until so- 
ciety became absorbed in him. After all, is it 
quite just to him to call it egotism.'' Was it not 
rather that he lived in a different world from that 
in which other people lived, and was at home with 
them only when he could draw them into his world 
and make them actors in it.'' 

Moreover the world stands in the way of the 
artist's overcoming his egotism. We refrain 
from praising the child, lest he be spoiled. But 
the man, who has had so many hard knocks, we 
think that he can stand praise. In the great 
artist's case, we do not stop to consider whether 
he can stand it or not. We praise because he 
forces our praise. But when the artist-man is still 
a child he cannot stand it. Yet the very thing 
that is spoiling the performer is necessary to the 
success of the performance. Were it not for an 
occasional "Well done," few of us would have the 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 91 

courage to keep on with our work day after day. 
While the artist's work may be play it is more ex- 
hausting than any work. He must therefore be 
sustained by sympathy. No great work of Art, 
George Henry Lewes tells us, is produced "with- 
out the co-operation of the nation." Again, is it 
egotism? Is it not better to say that in order to 
paint the joys and sorrows of the world, it is 
necessary to have the sympathy of the world? 
How go on with one's work, year after year, un- 
less there is some evidence of success? In 
some lines of life we can feel that we succeed, 
whether we please or not. But while no great 
artist works to please people, there is a sense in 
which success in art does consist in pleasing people. 
When a man is as much the creature of impulse 
as Tommy was, we say that he is deficient in will. 
But we do not call the child lacking in will be- 
cause he rushes headlong into action. On the 
contrary we say that he is willful, full of will — and 
in the old days parents were accustomed to say 
that the will of such a child must be broken. 
There are no parents to break the will of the 
Tommies, the Gocthes, the Shelleys and the By- 
rons. Were there such parents, it is doubtful 
whether they would succeed. So the child's will, 
the performing will, remains. The man's will, 
restraining, renouncing and controlling, does not 
develop. Self-development, so largely an activity 
of the performing will, is the natural virtue of 
childhood. This the Tommies have. Self-con- 



92 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

trol, the activity of the restraining will, is the ac- 
quired virtue of manhood. To this the Tommies 
do not attain. Again, it is the artist in Tommy 
that keeps him a child. Other men succeed in 
proportion as they hold on to themselves, the art- 
ist in proportion as he lets himself go. Other men 
succeed in proportion as they please others, the 
artist in proportion as he pleases himself, as he 
forces others to be pleased with what pleases him. 

The creature of impulse knows not the war in 
the members of which St. Paul writes. Grizel says 
that she has not a beautiful nature like Tommy's, 
she is so often rebellious. She is rebellious because 
she is a moral creature. There are two natures 
struggling within her. Tommy is not rebellious, 
because he does not fight. When an impulse 
seizes him, there is nothing within him to contend 
against it. That is, he is not a moral creature. 
I have somewhere read of a man who believed that 
God had forgotten to give him a soul. It would 
seem almost as though God had forgotten to give 
Tommy a moral sense, though there is something 
within him that thinks about the moral sense. 

Schiller maintained that the Fall of Man was 
the happiest event in the history of the race, for 
without it morality would have been impossible. 
Goethe, on the other hand, thought that we had 
paid too high a price for morality. And while it 
is certain that it is possible to be below morality, 
it is probable that it is possible to be above it. 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAJVIENT 93 

Under "the ultimate angel's law, law, life, joy, 
impulse are one thing." 

Even here there are some in whose natures 
struggle is almost absent. There may be a few 
who have practically no impulses that it is neces- 
sary to fight, whose wills not only in the main 
purpose, but in each detail, are naturally one with 
the Divine will. They are God's children from the 
very beginning; they do not have to struggle to 
become so. There are others, who have the lower 
impulses to some extent, but in whom the moral 
imperative is so strong, that no sooner is a 
thing clearly recognized as wrong, than there is 
no longer any desire to do it. With such per- 
sons the effort is not so much to do what is right 
as to find out what is right. Lastly, there are 
the children and the Tommies, who act at once 
upon their impulses, whether lower or higher, be- 
cause for the time being there is absolutely noth- 
ing with which these impulses can come into col- 
lision. Such characters are not without their 
charm. There is the savage within us that 
awakes at intervals to cry 

" Ship me somewhere east of Suez where the best is like 
the worst. 
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can 
raise a thirst." 

And there is the tired man within us that loves to 
think that Mr. Richard Harding Davis' delight- 



94 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

ful, irresponsible heroes are possible. But we 
know that in real life blessings do not abound 
wherever the Van Bibbers go. A broken-hearted 
and demented Grizel in Tommy's case, a Harriet 
compassing her own destruction in Shelley's case, 
a wrecked empire in the case of Alcibiades, these 
are the things that follow in the train of the real 
Van Bibbers. 

But while Tommy belongs to this third class of 
non-strugglers, we sometimes wonder what it is in 
him that debars him from the first class. None 
of his impulses are in themselves evil. Is it not 
again that he is simply the child, the child who 
cannot accommodate himself to the world of 
grown-up people, especially to the world where 
they marry and are given in marriage.'' 

One fancies that Tommy's books were calm and 
serene. They lifted one above the atmosphere of 
reality into the atmosphere of holiness, where no 
struggle is. His dislike for struggle was prob- 
ably one among many reasons why he could not 
write stories. In the essay-novel he could present 
that ideal life which is above struggle. In the 
story he would have to present actual life, in which 
there is naught but conflict. 

Hartley Coleridge, himself a Tommy, says 
that given such a character, the likelihood of ac- 
tion is inversely as the force of the motive and the 
time for reflection. " I think you could do the 
most courageous things," Grizel says to Tommy, 
" so long as there was no reason why you should 



THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 95 

do them." The child Grizel had said, " It is so 
easy to make up one's mind ! " " It's easy to you, 
that has just one mind," Tommy retorted, " but 
if you had as many minds as I have ! " The im- 
pulsive man acts with energy and decision because 
he allows no time for the imagination to work. 
But if immediate action is impossible the imagina- 
tive man will perhaps not act at all. He will see 
that there is as much to be said upon one side as 
the other. And the more important action is the 
less likely will he be to act. The very importance 
of the decision which he has to make paralyzes 
him, makes him weigh longer and longer the ob- 
jections which his fruitful imagination has to 
offer. 

The right-minded child is overflowing with lov- 
ingness. He loves everyone and he expects every- 
one to love him. All trouble calls forth his sym- 
pathy. He does not stop to inquire whether the 
sufferer has merited the suffering or not. It is 
enough for him that the suffering exists. If he 
can, he will alleviate it. In moments of anger he 
may inflict pain upon his playmates, in moments 
of thoughtlessness upon his elders. But no sooner 
does he realize the trouble that his waywardness 
has caused than he is filled with penitence. He 
is burning with a desire to make amends. That 
it should be his duty deliberately to cause suffer- 
ing, this is inconceivable to the child. 

To be grown up means, among other things, to 
have acquired the power to do hard things. The 



96 IN CAJVIBRroGE BACKS 

Tommies do not grow up. They make love to the 
Grizels that they may not know the pain of un- 
requited love. They make love to the Lady Pip- 
pinworths to atone for having humiliated them. 

" How we change ! " says Tommy, musing pen- 
sively of his boyhood. " How we dinna change ! " 
growls Aaron. And that is the remarkable thing 
about the Tommies. It is so difficult to change 
them. Sin leaves its mark upon the rest of us. 
We are never quite the same again. Sometimes 
it hardens us, sometimes it wakes us up. The 
Tommies are neither hardened nor awakened. 
Why? Is it because, through it all, they have 
been but children at play, and have preserved the 
purity and innocence of childhood? 

There have been, there are, there always will be 
artists in whom the man is strong enough to keep 
the child within him in order. He probably is the 
greatest artist, as well as the greatest man, who 
can be at the same time most a man and most a 
child. But to be an artist at all, it is absolutely 
necessary that the child be there. The presence 
of the man does not seem to be so essential. 

Society has done well in these latter days in 
insisting that the artist conforai to the same moral 
law to which other men are subject. Nevertheless 
the errors of genius have always commanded, and 
will always command, an undying sympathy. 
When the failings of the Goethes, the Shelleys, 
the Byrons and the Tommies are recounted, we 
echo Corp's cry "Dinna tell me to think ill o' that 



THE ARTISTIC TEIVIPERAMENT 97 

laddie !" Is it because we believe that downright 
genius, like downright love, atones for everything? 
Rather it is because we feel that the errors of gen- 
ius are those of an impulsive, generous nature, and 
we prefer the generous sinner to the calculating 
saint. 

Very early in the story of Tommy's manhood, 
Mr. Barrie tells us that he is suppressing a good 
many of the nice things that Tommy did, for fear 
that we might like himv But we saw through 
Mr. Barrie all the time, we knew that he was 
chastising Tommy in order that we might love 
him the more. And we are sure that the Creator, 
in dealing with the Tommies, remembers that they 
are but children. 



VI 

ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 

When we speak the lan^age to which we have 
always been accustomed, especially if that lan- 
guage happens to be English, we often use words 
which conceal quite as much as they reveal that 
which we have in mind. This practice of veiling 
our thoughts has become so habitual with us that 
when we really wish to express ourselves fully and 
completely, we often cannot find the words, and 
when we do succeed in saying exactly what we 
mean we are sometimes misunderstood, for it is as- 
sumed that we must always mean something a little 
different from what we say. But I have a foreign 
friend who in his picturesque English generally 
manages to express his meaning most forcibly and 
exactly. Once when I was with this gentleman, 
I happened to remark upon the fine appearance 
of a young man of our acquaintance. He re- 
plied, "His outside, yes, I must say it pleases me 
as well as that of any man that I know. His in- 
side, I have not yet arrived into it." 

I confess that I have always thought arriving 
into people's insides the most interesting thing in 
life ; that I am very fond of thinking over people's 
excellences and deficiencies and their probable 

dt 



ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 99 

causes, and that I am even sometimes given to 
talking them over with my friends. When I was 
a child this tendency was frowned upon. I was 
told that I must talk about things, not about 
people. Yet I noticed that the grown people that 
I knew, I believe because they were thinking, in- 
teresting, right-minded human beings, generally 
talked more about people than they did about 
things. Since I have been grown I have been told 
that if I lived a broader life, if I were not shut up 
in an institution, I would think less about people, 
more about things. I can only say that if this 
is really true, I am glad that I am shut up in an 
institution. For I believe that the man who said 
"The proper study of mankind is man," had so 
far at least advanced to be wise, and when our 
greatest nineteenth century poet told us that little 
else save the development of a soul is worth study, 
I believe that he knew what he was talking about. 
Nor can we imagine Shakespeare, Thackeray or 
Dickens refusing to discuss the characters of others 
in the proper way and to the proper persons. 

There is just one type of man to whom it may 
in a sense be permitted to find things more inter- 
esting than people, and that is the really great 
student of natural science. He is permitted to 
be more interested in the laws of nature than in 
man if he must be, because he may thus make dis- 
coveries that will benefit man. Yet even he, though 
a benefactor of his fellows, pays a certain penalty 
for his lack of interest in his beneficiaries. We 



100 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

often hear it said that this is an age in which there 
is a dearth of great men. This is probably un- 
true; we have the great men, but they are scien- 
tists, so although they are revolutionizing all our 
lives, we do not fully recognize them as great. 
They have not the lively interest in us human be- 
ings that Shakespeare and Dante had, so we have 
not the lively interest in them. To all time we 
shall be interested in all the details of Shakes- 
peare's life that we can get, but though we all 
profit by Sir Isaac Newton's discoveries, his biog- 
raphy would find comparatively few readers, and 
for the most part we no more love him than we 
love the law of gravitation. 

Some people seem to have the impression that 
it is perfectly legitimate to discuss the characters 
of others, provided that we do not know them, and 
therefore perhaps have very little data for dis- 
cussing them. As a teacher of Bible or of history 
I may, nay I must analyze the characters of St. 
Peter, of St. Paul, of Julius Caesar, of Queen 
Elizabeth, but how can I understand those whom 
I have not seen, except as I have some understand- 
ing of those whom I have seen.'' As an intelligent 
member of society, I am also supposed to have an 
opinion of public measures and of public men, but 
how am I to be capable of forming an opinion of 
them if I do not form opinions of the people about 
me and their measures.? And should the people 
that I read about in the newspapers and their 
deeds be more important to me than the people in 



ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 101 

my own little life and their deeds? To the world 
they are more important ; to me practically they 
cannot be, and should not be. For generally speak- 
ing it is by the small affairs which touch me, by 
the people with whom I come into personal contact 
that I am influenced, and it is upon these that I ex- 
ert an influence. I cannot influence public aff'airs, 
except in a very smiall degree by forming an opin- 
ion about them, since public opinion shapes events, 
and the opinion of each individual is a part of 
public opinion. And as in the case of the great 
men of the past and their measures, so in the case 
of the great men of the present and their meas- 
ures, I am competent to form an opinion of them 
only as I have trained my judgment by constantly 
forming opinions of the people about me, their 
actions and their motives. Furthermore, how can 
I understand things, the highest and best things, 
the things that my critics think that I should talk 
about, except as I understand people? Natural 
science, as has been seen, I may perhaps under- 
stand, while knowing very little of the human 
heart. But the function of painting, poetry and 
music is chiefly to express and call forth human 
emotion: how understand them except as I under- 
stand human emotion? 

I suppose that the idea that the criticism of 
others is wrong is founded upon the impression 
that others are necessarily hurt by the habit of 
criticism, perhaps also that we ourselves are hurt 
by it, since we are thereby made severe in our 



102 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

judgments, possibly even severe to the point of 
cruelty. There are those who admit that certain 
people for certain reasons are justified in analyz- 
ing those with whom they come in contact, but 
they maintain that the rest of us should take 
those whom we meet in a happy-go-lucky fashion, 
admiring their virtues and closing our eyes to 
their faults. Thus a friend writes me "Vivisection 
may be necessary and have valuable results, but it 
is not a part of my work," and again "It is easy 
to see faults, but much more difficult to see excel- 
lencies. I prefer to exercise what skill I have in 
detecting the latter." But is analysis of char- 
acter equivalent to spiritual vivisection, which 
keeps the victim writhing in agony, and perhaps 
makes the scientific observer callous and cold? 
And does the person who sees faults understand- 
ingly fail to see virtues? I have had some ac- 
quaintance with a class of people who are most 
rigidly principled against criticising others. 
They are generally children of the Puritans ; that 
is, they come of a race that believes more in self- 
control than in self-development, and that too 
often mistakes self-repression for self-control. 
Now I find that on the whole these people are more 
censorious, and they certainly are less interesting 
than are those who discuss others more freely, for 
they understand life less, and they themselves lack 
in fullness of life. 

There are three different positions which we 
take toward life at different stages of our ex- 



ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 103 

istence. First as little children, we are likely to 
think that everybody is good, and to love every- 
body. This position, alas ! we cannot maintain 
long, life knocks it out of us. So we arrive at our 
second position, in which we divide people into 
good and bad, feel that we must love and associate 
with the good, and avoid the bad, "we will not 
speak of them, look only and pass," or perhaps 
not even look. We may possibly labor for their 
salvation, but with the clear understanding that 
they are quite different beings from ourselves and 
our friends. This is more or less the position of 
all of us in extreme youth, and there are those who 
never advance much beyond it. Such people natu- 
rally do not wish to believe that some of those 
with whom they associate and even love must be 
classed among bad people, and since there is for 
them no middle ground the only way to keep on 
respecting their acquaintances and loving their 
friends is to deny that they have certain very ob- 
vious faults. To admit that they have these 
faults, that there is in their nature even the root 
of faults that are commonly considered "more hei- 
nous in the sight of God than are others," and still 
to keep on associating with them would seem to be 
a letting down of the moral standards. Thus my 
neighbor A, commenting upon a great, but not 
very obvious or technical dishonesty on the part 
of a woman who professed high principles, ex- 
claimed, "I cannot see how any respectable person 
could do such a thing." I replied, "Oh, I under- 



104 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

stand, and I even see how she fails to realize that 
she is doing anything wrong. My friend B 
could do the same thing, and believe that she was 
doing right, for while her moral sense is strong in 
some respects, it is not in that respect." To 
which A rejoined, "I cannot but feel that you 
judge your friend too harshly, but if you are 
right in your estimate of her, I do not see how you 
can care for her," I may be wrong in my analy- 
sis of my friend, but I am sure that I am not 
harsh in my attitude toward her, and whether my 
judgment of her is right or wrong, I am certainly 
very fond of her. 

When faults bear fruit in actual sin, the horror 
of these uncritical people who have refused to see 
the faults is unbounded. For they have not 
watched the gradual development of the sin ; they 
do not understand how it has sprung from a small 
seed which may be found in all of us, even in them- 
selves, only in them perhaps circumstances have 
not favored its development, or possibly training 
and will-power have prevented its bearing fruit. 
If we take a full-grown villain, at a definite period 
of life, such as Shakespeare's lago, he seems out- 
side the pale of human sympathy. But in the 
presence of Tito Melema we can only "consider 
ourselves, lest we also be tempted." The differ- 
ence is that lago is taken at the point of full de- 
velopment, so that we do not recognize that we 
have anything in common with him, while we see 
Tito's character unfolding from the beginning ; we 



ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 105 

feel that at almost any point, given similar circum- 
stances, we might have done the same thing. Our 
attitude toward lago is like that of a person who 
will not criticise others, which means that he will 
not understand others, until suddenly he is brought 
face to face with some great sin, and then, well 
then he does not understand, and his unqualified 
condemnation springs from the same source as did 
his complacent charity ; complacent, I have said, 
but the complacency was with himself, the virtuous 
person who never speaks evil of anyone. Then 
too while such a man does not censure others in 
words, he certainly makes the people with whom 
he associates, especially if they happen to be 
sufficiently interested in humanity to talk about 
it, feel that he is censuring them, and censuring 
them unjustly and misunderstandingly, that he 
simply says "That is wrong," and leaves it at 
that. Nor do such people often acquire intimate 
friends, for close friendship demands intimate 
knowledge, and one who will not express his opin- 
ions, or perhaps does not even allow himself to 
form opinions, cannot be intimately known. He 
does not know himself, nor is it possible for us to 
know him. 

So much for the second position. There is a 
third position where one sees the evil, but sees also 
the good beneath the evil, and has the clear faith 
to believe that evil will be overcome by good.- 
Some see this by intuition, but generally it is by 
the constant practice of analysis, of criticism, 



106 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

that we come to reflect that there is no fault that 
has not a virtue at its root, and therefore no fault, 
unless perhaps it be deliberate cruelty, that can 
make a person positively unlovable. 

We come to wonder even whether there is such 
a thing as deliberate cruelty, whether what has 
that appearance is not generally unstrung nerves, 
frequently caused by great mental suffering. I 
find myself somewhat in sympathy with William 
Rufus because of that blasphemous sentence of his, 
"God shall never find a good man in me, I have 
suffered too much at his hands." I recognize the 
blasphemy, but the suffering that called forth the 
blasphemy makes me sympathize with the man. 
I do not know just what he had suffered, probably 
whatever it was it was mostly through his own 
fault, but I can fancy him driven almost insane 
by the punishment that seemed greater than he 
could bear, so that scarcely conscious of anything 
save his own blinding, morally blinding, pain, he 
took a fiendish delight in making others suffer, or 
as he thought, in getting even with God. 

There was at first nothing more shocking to 
me than that Ibsen's Hedda Gabler should make 
fun of her aunt's bonnet, the bonnet which the 
dear old lady had bought in order that her new 
niece should not be ashamed of her. But when 
Hedda told the story to Judge Brock, and added 
"You see it just takes me like that all of a sudden. 
And then I can't help doing it. Oh, I don't know 
how I am to explain it," I understood, or thought 



ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS lOT 

that I did. The thing that "took her all of a 
sudden" was the misery of her own life, a life en- 
tirely out of place, a life which was meant to con- 
tribute to the sum total of beauty in the world, 
and could not. Hedda could have resisted the 
temptation to be cruel, we can all resist temp- 
tation, but it would have been very difficult for 
her to have done so, and certainly many of us in 
her place would have done as she did. For some 
of us, alas ! can, by looking into our own hearts, 
or by recalling bitter memories of the past, under- 
stand that kind of cruelty. Have there not been 
times when, out of sorts with ourselves and our lot, 
we have taken a fiendish delight in saying or doing 
the cruel thing? have even in a certain sense ex- 
ulted in the suffering that we have caused, and all 
perhaps because we were suffering such wild mis- 
ery ourselves. Perhaps they whom we thus 
grieved are no longer living. How we would love 
some assurance of pardon now, but while they were 
with us we gave no sign of craving for it ! For 
after all has been said that can be said in ex- 
planation of it, intentional cruelty must still be 
the worst of all sins, it certainly is the sin for 
which we suffer most remorse. 

But while nothing can fully excuse this or any 
other sin, analysis does explain, does make the sin- 
ner, every sinner, come within the pale of human 
sympathy. So we find the analytical person at 
bottom far kinder than the person who refuses to 
criticise. For analysis is simply trying to under- 



108 IX CA3IBRIDGE BACKS 

stand. And when we understand we must be 
charitable ; nay, there is no room for charity in 
the modern perverted sense of the word, but only 
for love. I have a friend who, when she sums up 
the character of another, bestows her highest 
praise when she says, "She is not easily shocked." 
And if the not being easily shocked does not mean 
an absence of standards, but rather a knowledge 
of human nature, an ability to see not only the 
deed, but just what led to it, then surely it is de- 
serA-ing of high praise. God is never shocked, for 
He knows all. That is why we are not ashamed 
to confess our sins to God, for we know that He 
understands all, not only what we do and what we 
say, but the inmost thoughts of our hearts, all the 
inherited tendencies, all the temptations that come 
from environment. So it seems to me that He 
can hardly be said to forgive us, He just under- 
stands us, and when we really understand there is 
little room for forgiveness : sympathy and help 
take its place. In the presence of our fellowmen 
we are ashamed, for we feel that there are no 
words by which we can make them fully under- 
stand. We can only tell them part, nor can we 
even be sure as to what we tell them means to 
them. For few men have even in small measure 
that power which He had of whom it was said 
"He needed not that any should testify to Him of 
man, for He Himself knew what was in man." 
Yet the thoughtful, analytical person, he who 
knows others a little, and his own heart perhaps a 



ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 109 

little more, does understand man at least enough 
to know that no one is absolutely black or ab- 
solutely white. We remember that hard saying 
of the old-fashioned theologian "There is enough 
evil in the best action of the best man to damn 
him." It may be true, a seed of evil in the best 
action of the best man, which if allowed to develop, 
would be sufficient to damn. But if true the con- 
verse is at least equally true, "There is enough of 
good in the worst action of the worst man to save 
him," a seed of good which, if allowed to develop, 
will be sufficient to save. And he who has suffi- 
cient penetration and analytical power to see this 
must be an optimist. A friend of mine speaking 
of a popular play said, "Its lesson seems to be 
that while society is all wrong, yet at bottom it is 
all right after all." Understood aright that is 
life's lesson. That is quite a different thing from 
saying that it is all right to be all wrong; it 
simply means that underneath the all wrong is 
something that is all right, and that will in the 
end get the better of the all wrong. The only 
optimism that is of any account is the optimism of 
such a man as Browning, who thoroughly under- 
stands sin, has so to speak penetrated it, and come 
out on the other side. The optimism of a man 
who does not know sin, who shuts his eyes to the 
truth is worthless, for it is nothing but ignorance ; 
but I believe that when we know sin intimately, the 
tendency of such a knowledge will be not toward 
pessimism, but toward optimism. 



110 IN CAJVIBRIDOE BACKS 

Then if the danger of thoughtful criticism is 
not that we shall be cruel to others, does it not lie 
in the other direction? Should we not be afraid 
that we may become too lenient to sin? that we 
may even come to feel that there is no such thing 
as sin, since a man may do bad things and not be 
at heart a bad man, and since evil is after all but 
good in the making? Or may we not become 
fatalistic, since we see that sin is so largely the 
result of heredity and environment, or even of 
physical disease? I answer that this habit of 
mind will and should make us more lenient to sin- 
ners, because we come to recognize that what in 
the end was a great evil sprang from a small seed, 
a seed which perhaps exists in each of us. But 
unless we are very superficial people, it will tend 
to make us more careful rather than more lax in 
our own lives, for seeing from what small begin- 
nings great evils flow, we will be more careful to 
check the small beginnings in ourselves, and so far 
as we may in othei's for whom we may be in any 
degree responsible. Check, or direct, as may seem 
best, for the impulses which lead to evil are often 
such as properly directed, would lead to good. 
As a child I used to think that bad people meant 
to be bad. Now I see that probably no one in the 
beginning at least means to be bad, we only do not 
mean to be good. We do not need to mean to be 
bad, if we only allow ourselves to drift we will be 
bad, but in order to be good we must mean to be 
good. Hence we come to understand as Mr. 



ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 111 

Chesterton says that while we may all ultimately 
be saved, it is safest to live as though we were all 
in danger of being damned. We begin too to ap- 
proach God's position, and hate the sin even in its 
beginnings, especially in ourselves, but love the 
sinner; hate the sin because it destroys the sinner 
whom we love. At bottom we can have no hope 
except as we do believe in the sinfulness of sin. 
For if sin is inevitable, the necessary result of 
heredity, environment and physique, then there is 
no hope ; we are no more responsible for it than we 
are for being short or tall, nor can we change one 
more than the other. But if sin is the result of 
the action or lack of action of the will, then it is 
possible to get rid of it And while we may be- 
lieve that there is good in everything and every- 
body, that should not blind us to the greater good 
in the better things and the better people. Says 
Ogniben in Browning's "Soul's Tragedy" "God 
has His archangels and consorts with them; 
though he made too and intimately sees what is 
good in the worm." 

And then too just as the seeing what is good in 
evil should not make us incline toward the evil, so 
the seeing all sides of a question should not pre- 
vent us from taking sides. Some of the best 
minds have been ineffectual because of their very 
breadth to which there was no corresponding 
depth. Thus Macaulay says of George Savile, 
Marquis of Halifax, that the historian must be 
partial to him, because he saw things at the time 



112 IN CAJMBRIDGE BACKS 

as the historian sees them after they are over. 
But HaHfax's own life as a statesman was in a 
great measure a failure, and largely because of this 
very power, which was not balanced by practical 
common sense. 

While it may be admitted that this gift of an- 
alysis, of understanding the characters of others 
is in itself helpful and tends more toward kindness 
than toward unkindness, why should I talk over 
the characters of others? My friend who likens 
analysis to vivisection, writes that if she had ex- 
traordinary power to understand character, she 
should pray that she might have the strength to 
keep her knowledge to herself, so that no one 
should obtain any information about the failures 
of others from her. Well, as I have said before, I 
believe that the power of analysis helps me, helps 
me to do my daily work, to teach History and 
Bible better, for it is only as I understand life a 
little in the concrete, that I can in some measure 
understand the abstract laws of life, which our 
Lord Himself, the apostles and the prophets have 
taught us. I have spoken too of that youthful 
position in which we perhaps think that we must 
labor for the salvation of others without under- 
standing their sin. To be sure it is better to fix 
the mind upon what people are to be converted to 
rather than upon what they are to be converted 
from, and yet there are times when a sympathetic 
understanding of the latter is also desirable. 
"Priests should study passion ; how else help man- 



ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 113 

kind who come for help in passionate extremes?" 
So those who would help themselves and others to 
correct faults should study faults. And just as 
I cannot understand or help others except as I 
understand myself, so I cannot understand or help 
myself except as I understand others. Therefore 
it is important that I should not only retain what 
power of analysis I have, but that I should let it 
grow, and both retention and growth are depend- 
ent upon expression. Moreover if I am to come 
into any close touch with my friends I must know 
what they think, and they must know what I think 
about people and things, for we know each other 
chiefly as we know each other's opinions of life, 
and our opinions of life can generally be best 
gathered from our opinions of lives. 

Nevertheless there are some rules to be adhered 
to in the exercise of criticism which may all be 
summed up in one, to wit, never criticise in such a 
way as to hurt anyone, except of course when for 
some real good it is necessary to hurt. Thero 
may be times when it is best to criticise a person 
to his face in such a way as to hurt. There may 
also be times when it is best to criticise a person 
to someone else in order to prevent his getting an 
appointment which he is not fitted to fill, but to 
fail to secure such a post will not really hurt him. 
And there may be other ways in which it is some- 
times justifiable to speak of a person's faults or 
deficiencies in such a way as will hurt. But in 
general I think that I should never criticise a fel- 



114 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

low-being in such a way as will hurt him or hurt 
me, for unkindly criticism hurts the critic far 
more than it hurts the person criticised. And I 
find that in order to obey this rule, I must obey 
at least two other rules. First, Never analyze 
anyone's character for the benefit of those who do 
not know human nature well enough to under- 
stand. My neighbor A was right in objecting 
to my exposure of my friend B's weakness. I 
should not have mentioned it to her, for she was 
not able to understand, and I knew her well 
enough to know that she would not be able to un- 
derstand. It is only when we can think out the 
faults and deficiencies of a mutual acquaintance 
together, sympathize because we understand, and 
because we understand one human being better, 
understand life better, that such discussion can do 
good. I have been asked how I would feel if I 
knew that two of my friends were in the habit of 
discussing my character. I answer that I hope 
that my friends are sufficiently interested in me 
to discuss my character, and I know that if they 
are really my friends such discussion will do me no 
harm. Either in talking me over they will decide 
that certain faults which one or both of them had 
attributed to me are not there, or if they are there 
they will find an explanation for them which will 
partially excuse; or if no explanation can be 
found, they will love me just the same. 

And this brings me to the other rule which I find 
it necessary to follow, namely, not to talk over the 



ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 115 

faults of anyone, if these faults awaken dislike 
in me, unless indeed it is with a person who can 
cure me of this dislike by making me understand. 
For generally speaking talking over that which 
we dislike strengthens the dislike, thereby hurting 
us and perhaps also hurting the person under dis- 
cussion. Moreover we can hardly be fair to that 
which we really dislike, "He that is spiritual judg- 
eth all things," and by " he who is spiritual" I 
think is meant he who really thinks about the 
things that concern humanity, for no one can think 
on these topics and not be spiritual. But yet 
there is a "more excellent way," the way that is set 
forth in that wonderful analysis of the "love that 
sufFereth long and is kind," of the "love that 
thinketh no evil." And it is perfectly true that 
the person who has the best intellectual under- 
standing of people is not always the person who 
has the best practical understanding of them, 
knows best how to get on with them, because some- 
times the interest is purely intellectual, there is 
no heart interest, we judge but not in that more 
excellent way of which the apostle writes. 

I find it tolerably easy to understand and 
sympathize with the excesses of humanity, for 
these are so often but the perversions of a great 
nature, but it is more difficult for me to sympa- 
thize with the deficiencies of human nature, and 
especially with what would perhaps hardly seem 
a fault at all, just a lack of aspiration, a too great 
contentment not with one's outer estate, but with 



116 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

one's mental and spiritual condition. Here again 
the foreign friend of whom I spoke at the begin- 
ning of this essay said what seemed to me a wise 
thing. We were discussing some mutual acquaint- 
ances who were probably useful in a small sphere, 
good moral people certainly, but people who had 
very little horizon, who saw very little beyond their 
everyday life. He made the remark, "What I do 
not like about them is that they are so happy." 
I reminded him that he had lately expressed ad- 
miration for certain other acquaintances, for the 
very reason that they were happy. He replied, 
"It is one thing to diffuse an atmosphere of happi- 
ness, another thing to be so damned happy your- 
self." As I thought it over it seemed to me that 
he had defined the case accurately, had used ex- 
actly the right adjective. Those who are happy 
in the sense of being without aspiration are liter- 
ally damned, that is condemned not to grow. For 
it is only those who hunger and thirst who shall be 
filled. It is only the "crop-fed bird and the maw- 
crammed beast" whom care does not irk, and whom 
doubt does not fret. "A man's reach must exceed 
his grasp." 

But if I condemn these people, it is perhaps be- 
cause I do not criticise or analyze, I only condemn ; 
for it is easy to analyze an excess, difficult to 
analyze a deficiency ; something is not there that 
should be, that is all. Yet perhaps as certain 
faults are only surface-deep, so certain seeming 
deficiencies may be only surface-deep. Do not 



ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 117 

people sometimes seem lacking in aspiration be- 
cause too timid to give expression to their as- 
pirations? Perhaps too the fault is in myself, 
perhaps my attitude toward them is over-bearing 
and censorious, so they feel that they must hide 
their real selves from me. I have not the power 
to draw them out. And even granted that they 
are as deficient as I suppose them to be, as I am 
tolerant of spiritual people who are not always 
moral, cannot I be tolerant of moral people who 
are not always spiritual? At any rate we can 
love all our neighbors in the way in which Christ 
commanded us to love them, "as ourselves." Not 
as we love our friends, that would be impossible, 
but as we love ourselves. Love for our friends in- 
cludes an emotional element which cannot be 
forced, it goes like the wind where it listeth. But 
love for ourselves consists in seeking our own best 
interests, and in that way, we can love everyone. 
Arnold of Rugby tells us that he had a sister 
who early formed a resolution never to talk about 
herself, and to this resolution she adhered during 
the whole of her life. I cannot say that such a 
determination, taken literally, appears to me to 
be praiseworthy. People who never talk about 
themselves are likely to be uninteresting, for if 
we are attracted by them what we want to know 
is their real selves. It is true of those who never 
talk about themselves to an even greater degree 
than it is true of those who never talk about others 
that they do not make close friends, although when 



118 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

there is great beauty of character, they may com- 
mand a certain reverent affection. Mr. Howells 
tells us that Longfellow had too little egotism to 
form intimate friendships. Just as there are peo- 
ple who resolve not to talk about themselves, so 
there are people who resolve not to talk about 
others. Both resolutions are mistaken. The 
ideal is not to refrain from talking about either 
ourselves or others, but to know to whom to talk 
and how to talk. Of course there is a temptation 
to talk to the wrong person and in the wrong way, 
and perhaps this temptation or at least the latter 
half of it, comes with peculiar force to those of 
us who follow the profession of teaching. It is 
part of our business to criticise, and it is easy 
to fall into the habit of criticising unwisely and 
unkindly. So we need to pray with Charles Wes- 
ley 

" Preserve me from my calling's snare." 

And in all our criticism we must with Oliver Crom- 
well "have the grace to believe that we may be 
mistaken." 



VII 

THE FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 

I FIND that the great joy in an illness such as 
I am having this summer is that it furnishes a 
time in which, being released from the practical 
duties of life, I can give myself wholly to loving. 
Whether awake or asleep, or in that delightful 
state between waking and sleeping, those whom I 
love are always present with me. In my waking 
hours I do not so much think happy thoughts 
about my dear ones as lose myself in that blissful 
revery which is to thought what thought is to 
action, in which their spirits seem to commune with 
my spirit, so that although I lie awake at night 
I do not suffer from it, because I am so happy. 
When I sleep I am not conscious of dreaming, yet 
when I awake it is with the feeling that I have been 
even happier in sleep than I am in my waking 
hours, because still nearer to loved ones. When I 
first open my eyes I have almost the physical sen- 
sation of holding the hand of one or another 
friend, generally someone whom I know to be 
thousands of miles away. This added happiness 
I carry with me through the day, for they who 
have been with me sleeping do not leave me wak- 
ing. And I wonder whether it was after an ex- 
119 



120 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

perience such as this that the Psahnist wrote, "I 
remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on Thee 
in the night-watches," and again "When I awake, 
I am still with Thee." Thus my thoughts pass 
from the human and finite to the Divine and In- 
finite, and I wonder to what extent the heavenly 
love can be like the earthly, how far we can really 
set our hearts, our beating, throbbing hearts, our 
whole passion of loving upon that which is in 
Heaven. 

I once heard a young wife say, "How can I be 
expected to love God more than I love my husband 
and children?" I replied, "Oh, it is a different kind 
of love that you give to God from that which you 
give to your husband and children. Ask your- 
self whether you would prefer that God should not 
exist than that you should lose your husband and 
children? That is the real test." I knew of a 
boy who wished to connect himself with a church. 
A good man who was interested in him talked to 
him about the obligation that one who was about 
to take such a step was under to love God. A 
woman whom I thought wise, overheard the con- 
versation and objected to it. "See here," she said 
to the man, when she could get him alone, "that 
boy has not yet learned to love anyone. He does 
not know what love is. Never in his life has he 
really loved a human being, and if a man love not 
his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love 
God whom he has not seen? To tell him that it 
is his duty to love God will, if it has any effect at 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 121 

all upon him, simply make him sentimental and in- 
sincere. Most of the talk about loving God is 
cant, it is only richly gifted people who can really 
love God in any personal way. But the boy does, 
so far as he understands life and himself, mean 
to do right. To come into the communion of the 
church, to be associated with others who mean to 
do right, will strengthen that purpose. So it is 
well that he should be a member of the church." 
We have heard too the story of the great liter- 
ary man and idealist who fell in love with a beau- 
tiful girl who returned his love, but would not 
marry him unless he could say that he loved God 
more than he loved her. He thought that he 
could not say that, so there was no marriage, and 
shortly afterward the girl died, her death perhaps 
hastened by the strain to which she had been sub- 
jected. I have always thought that Mr. Ruskin's 
unwillingness to say that he loved God more than 
he loved his earthly love was a proof that he did 
thus love Him. For if he did not love the right- 
eousness which God represents, and which God re- 
quires more than he loved the girl, why should he 
have hesitated to tell a falsehood and say that he 
loved God more than he loved her? So far as we 
can see no person would have been hurt by this, 
only the ideal of truth which is part of God. But 
he preferred to lose her whom his soul loved rather 
than sin against that ideal. It has always seemed 
to me that the sacrifice was needless, for the fact 
that love for her could not make him do what he 



122 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

believed to be sinning against God proved that he 
did love God more than he loved her, only in a 
different way. "What doth the Lord require of 
thee but to do justice and to love mercy and to 
walk humbly with thy God?" "Pure religion and 
undefiled before God and the Father is this, to 
visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, 
and to keep himself unspotted from the world." 
Perhaps this is the nearest that most of us who 
"have not seen God at any time" can get to loving 
Him, and therefore it is all that can be required. 
So I reasoned with myself until very lately. 
Then I began to consider the commandment, 
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and 
with all thy strength." To love God with all the 
soul means to love Him with all the aspiration 
after Truth, after Beauty, after Righteousness of 
which our nature is capable; to love Him with all 
the strength is the same thing as to love Him with 
all the will, that is, not to be content with a raptur- 
ous contemplation of the beauty of holiness, but to 
make every effort to realize in ourselves the right- 
eousness of holiness, to give expression to our im- 
pression by becoming what we adore, thus making 
the ideal the real. To love Him with all the mind, 
that surely means that it is our duty not only to 
do what is right, but to find out what is right, to 
seek after righteousness with the same passion with 
which the scientist seeks after truth, and the artist 
seeks after beauty, and thus to attain not only 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 123 

self-control, but also self-development. But what 
of loving Him with all the heart ? Is it not to feel 
as Mary did when she brought the box of oint- 
ment, very precious, and anointed the God-Man's 
feet? And the story seems to indicate that that 
lavish offering of real heart-affection pleased the 
Master more than anything else that was done 
for Him during his whole earthly pilgrimage. 
Hence I conclude that there are two kinds of love 
that can be given to God, first that which Ruskin 
did give to Him, harmony with His ideals in so 
far as he understood them, and obedience to His 
will. But on the other hand Ruskin was right 
when he said that he did not love God as he should ; 
the emotional love which he gave to the creature 
he could not give to the Creator, and God wants 
that too. Perhaps just as the earthly parent 
craves the child's love more than his mere obedi- 
ence, so from the very heart of God the request 
comes to each one of us "My child, give me thy 
heart." For God loves us; cold obedience can 
only wound the heart that loves ; what it seeks is 
fellowship, and fellowship comes only from a union 
of hearts. 

And yet is it just to command us to love the 
Lord our God with all our heart? can such love be 
regarded as a duty? It is our duty to do only 
that which we can do, that which by an effort of 
the will we can make ourselves do. It is easy to 
see that it is our duty to love the Lord our God 
with all our strength, to will what He wills, to seek 



124 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

to accomplish what He is seeking to accomplish, 
and the will can force the mind to do its part, and 
perhaps even can force the soul. But can the 
will force the heart? In our human relations it 
cannot; love is like the wind, which blows where it 
listeth; we are not able to love because it is de- 
sirable to do so, or because the person is worthy. 
Personal love for a friend is a gift, and personal 
love for God, the power to talk face to face with 
God as a man talketh with his friend, is also a 
gift. Such love is given only to one who already 
has a rich emotional nature, but the rich emo- 
tional nature is itself a gift. Such love is the 
distinguishing characteristic of those whom their 
fellow-Christians have recognized as saints, but 
the saint's temperament is at bottom very simi- 
lar to that of the artist, only expressing itself in 
a different way. That which the artist puts into 
art, the saint puts into love. Love then is given 
to the saint as art is given to the artist. Nor 
should it surprise us that many of the saints of 
old have been great sinners before they became 
great saints, for the emotional nature that is 
capable of the greatest heights is also capable of 
the lowest depths. And if God and the devil be 
represented as fighting over a soul, the fight will 
be hardest for the soul that is of greatest worth. 
Still while emotional love whether for God or 
man is a gift, we all feel that there is something 
lacking in a nature that does not possess it ; there- 
fore, it seems natural that God should require 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDIVIENT 125 

it of us, since He requires perfection of us, and 
somehow, though we cannot reason it out, it seems 
right that He should. Perhaps the justice lies 
in the fact that while this heart love is a gift, it 
is a gift that will always be given to us if we do 
our part. And our part is not to try to induce 
emotion, manufactured emotion is always an en- 
emy to real love, but to love in the ways in which 
we can, with the strength, with the mind, and with 
the soul, and if the other love which I begin to see 
is higher and better is not given to us in this life, 
it will be given to us in that which is to come. "If 
ye love me," Jesus said, "keep my command- 
ments." Would He not also have said, "If ye 
keep my commandments, ye will love me".'' 

Probably most of us get a little foretaste even 
in this life of what this highest love is. Some- 
times with the consciousness of sin there is vouch- 
safed to us a vision of Him whom we have pierced, 
and then "we needs must love the highest when 
we see it." Perhaps this love is given to us in 
times of sorrow, sorrow which presses us down 
so that we feel the everlasting arms which are un- 
derneath. For as suffering is the true cement of 
love between man and man, so it is also the true 
cement of love between man and God. God draws 
near to us, and shares the suffering with us. Or 
it may be given in times of joy, for if He enters 
into our sorrow. He enters equally into our joy. 
If it be true that for men to love each other they 
must have shed tears together, I think that the 



126 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

tears must be not only tears of sorrow, but also 
tears of joy. Sometimes it comes to us when a 
new friendship comes into our lives, for human 
love is often the shortest way to the Divine. 
Most of us have at least a fleeting vision of it as 
we celebrate the Feast of Love, that service which 
all Christians recognize as the highest symbol of 
our union and communion with the Divine. To 
our fathers the Eucharist was more than a sym- 
bol, it was the actual realization of the fact that 
their fellowship was in Heaven. In it Jesus Him- 
self drew near to them, His strength descended 
upon them, their hearts warmed within them as 
they cried, "Abide with us. Lord, at least we can- 
not let Thee go except Thou bless us." And 
often their prayer was granted. He did not go, 
He stayed to bless. If we could approach it in 
the same spirit, would we, too, receive what they 
received ? 

Whether we attain unto this love of God or 
not, I cannot imagine that there is any human 
being who does not at times feel the need of it. 
For the mind cries out for the Absolute, the heart 
cries out for the Infinite, the soul cries out for 
the Divine, the whole being cries out for God. 
The practical man needs Him to put a touch of 
idealism into his life, the thinker needs Him to 
put certainty into his. There are times when we 
all yearn to give ourselves completely to someone 
whom we can adore, with whom we can be our best 
selves, who can understand those vague yearn- 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 127 

ings which we do not ourselves understand, those 
incommunicable and intransmissible feelings which 
scarcely reach the surface of our consciousness. 
God knows about them, but we do not, we only 
vaguely feel them. Is not this very longing 
God's pleading with us to accept His gift, the 
gift of love for Him to correspond to His love 
for us? Is it not His voice sa3^ing to us, "Come 
unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, 
and I will give you rest." Rest from what.'' 
Rest from the vain struggle to be ourselves, for 
in Him we find ourselves, in Him we are complete. 
But we quench the Spirit, we shake off our rev- 
erie, and so perhaps to the end of life these occa- 
sional moments of Divine homesickness are all 
that we know of the real love of God. 

For friendship with God takes time, just as 
human friendship takes time. I must take time 
to get acquainted with my friend, so I must take 
time to get acquainted with God. When I was a 
child I was taught the best way to get acquainted 
with Him was through the revelation which He 
has made of Himself in Jesus. Lately I have come 
to realize this a little for myself, and the realiza- 
tion of old things makes them seem new. I have 
a colleague who says that I know her pretty well, 
but I do not know much about her. If I know 
her it is because we have spent considerable time 
together ; she has not told me mucli about her life 
before we met, there are many things even in her 
present life which I do not know, but we live to- 



1^ IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

gether, I see how she lives, and somethnes she 
talks to me about the things for which she cares. 
And I listen and ponder over what she says, not 
so much because of interest in the thing itself, 
although that is always interesting, but in order 
that I may know and understand her. So I know 
her without knowing much about her. I have 
always been familiar with the New Testament ; as 
a child I studied it carefully in order that I might 
know about Jesus. But of late I have studied 
it not so much that I might know about Jesus, 
but that I might know Jesus Himself. Indeed, 
when I stop to think about it, it is wonderful how 
little the New Testament tells us about Him ; I 
conclude, therefore, that it is not necessary to 
know much about Him. After all, I know very 
little about anyone, there is no one of whom I 
could write a satisfactory biography, and yet 
there are many people whom I know. Perhaps 
even the apostles did not know much about Jesus, 
but they knew Him, and they strove to make us 
know Him as they knew Him. For it comes to 
me now that He is the important Fact ; not even 
His teaching is of supreme importance except as 
it helps us to know Him. For it is not His teach- 
ing but He Himself who of God is made unto us 
wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and 
redemption. He Himself, not His teaching, is 
the Way by which we come to God. So while 
others have been willing that we should forget 
them so long as we remembered their teaching, 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 129 

He wishes us to remember Him. "This do in re- 
membrance of Me." For He was the only teacher 
who did not have to be ashamed of His life in 
comparison with what He taught. So we must 
take time to know Him, and knowing Him we 
know the Father also. For the new thhig that 
He brought into the world was that feeling of 
vital union with the Father, so that to be one 
with Him is also to be one with the Father, for 
to know Jesus Christ is to know the only true 
God. 

When we really love God with the heart, that 
is, when He becomes a Person to us, there arises 
within us a great longing to pray, to enter into 
direct communication with Him as we are in di- 
rect communication with our earthly friends. 
For to pray is to talk with God, to lift up our 
hearts to Him in order that His heart may come 
down to us. As children we were taught to ask 
God for all that we wished. But most of us have 
a period in which we give up the habit, if indeed 
it is only a habit. We may give it up because 
we are indifferent, or because life becomes too 
material. Or perhaps we take the position of a 
little girl whom I knew, who having prayed for 
fine weather in order that she might go on an ex- 
cursion, when the day dawned rainy, remarked, 
"I am going to throw God away, and get another 
God." Or it may be that there is a time of in- 
formal prayer which is not at all lacking in spir- 
ituality, in which loving God with the soul. 



130 IN CAJVIBRIDGE BACKS 

though not with the heart, is very strong. In- 
deed, I have had seasons in which formless prayer, 
no kneeling, no words, just an inarticulate as- 
piration for what is Above and Beyond, has 
seemed much more spiritual than any petition in 
the kneeling posture. For it was so unnecessary 
to ask God for anything since He knew all about 
it anyhow. I have sometimes thought that we 
were taught to ask for things simply because we 
are so crude, that except as we ask for definite 
things, we should have no communication with 
Him at all, but when we really establish com- 
munion with Him, we cease to ask for things, that 
crude praying has performed its mission. What 
should we think of the child who each day kept 
asking its parents for the same thing? Would 
it not be the height of impertinence? The child 
asks once, because if he did not, the parents 
would perhaps not know what it was that he 
wanted. But if the parent says, "I will see about 
it," the well-trained child does not ask again, he 
awaits the parent's pleasure. Now God prac- 
tically says, "I will see about it" ; if we carry out 
the analogy of the child, the request should not 
be repeated. But why should it be made even 
once? Does not our Father know all that we 
have need of before we ask Him? True, our 
Lord continued all night in prayer to God. 
But was He asking for things? Was He not 
rather just casting Himself upon His Father's 
love, feeling that the Father was there? Has. 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 131 

not He Himself told us that "In that day ye shall 
ask me nothing?" 

All this seems to me good reasoning, yet 
perhaps because the heart is not a reasoner, when 
we really begin to love God with the heart, we 
frequently go back to the mode of prayer of child- 
hood, we ask Him for what we want. It is true 
that we do not ask so much for things material 
and tangible as we did when we were younger, 
but then when we come to love God with the heart, 
we do not want material and tangible things as 
we did before. In the form of prayer which our 
Lord taught us, there is one petition for mate- 
rial blessing, five for spiritual blessings. Some- 
times when we do want tangible things we fear 
and rightly fear to ask for them, lest the very 
asking should make us want them too much. 
Thus I have a friend to whose lot it fell to take 
care of a very sick sister. The sick woman's 
husband asked her to join him in prayer for her 
recovery. She replied, "I cannot do that, because 
I need all my strength to take care of her. When 
I pray for a thing I come to want it so much that 
it takes all my strength. And in the present case 
prayer is quite unnecessary, God loves her and He 
loves us. He knows all about it, and He will do 
what is best for us all." I thought that my friend 
was right for herself, but she was right because 
for one of her temperament, prayer for her sis- 
ter's recovery would not have been real prayer. 
For the desire of the troubled heart to influence 



1S2 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

the will of God to its own advantage, perhaps 
even to break the chain of cause and effect, is not 
prayer. We do not enter into real communion 
with God through it, any more than the mother of 
the condemned criminal, begging for pardon, en- 
ters thereby into communion with the governor. 
Prayer is union and communion of hearts and 
wills. So when we really pray for a sick friend, 
we do not so much ask for his recovery, whatever 
the words may be, as we take our Father into our 
anxiety and sorrow and obtain His sympathy. 
Jesus prayed, "If it be possible, let this cup pass 
from me," in order that He might obtain strength 
to drink the cup. We should pray as He did, 
pray as Roberston of Brighton has so well put it, 
"until prayer makes us forget our own wish, and 
leave or merge it in God's will" ; nothing else is 
prayer. But there are certain things which it 
can never hurt anyone to pray for and to pray 
for repeatedly. We can all pray to be kept from 
sin, to be given power to conquer faults, strength 
to bear burdens, to grow in grace, and we should 
pray often for these things for the very reason 
that prayer for them will fix the attention upon 
them, will make us want them more. 

Yet I fancy that even when we love God with 
the heart, while the desire for prayer will always 
be there, just as the desire for communion with a 
dear earthly friend will always be there, it will 
not always be easy to obtain our desire, at least 
not until love is made perfect in us, and we are 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 133 

made perfect in love. Prayer often begins with a 
struggle. Jacob had to wrestle all night with the 
angel before he obtained the blessing. Jesus Him- 
self was in an agony in Gethsemane before the 
prayer that meant real communion was vouchsafed 
to Him. For as we can have no real good thing 
except as we consciously long for it and struggle 
for it, so we cannot have the best thing, Divine 
communion, without a sti'uggle ; indeed, the strug- 
gle is part of the blessing. "As the hart pant- 
eth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul 
after Thee, oh God." We must pant before we 
can have the living water, thirst before we can 
have the living God. 

But what is the effect of this emotional love 
upon character.'' I think that it must be in a 
greater degree the same as the effect of an emo- 
tional, idealizing friendship upon character; that 
is, it is inspiring, creative. For it is emotional 
love, and only emotional love that is creative. The 
friend whom I love unemotionally and almost un- 
consciously, that is whom I like rather than love, 
may hold me to my duty, but it is only the friend 
whom I love emotionally and consciously who in- 
spires me to do my best, nay, who inspires me to 
do that which I cannot do. Under the influence 
of conscious love I seem to understand that which 
I cannot understand, for to the lover as to the 
artist revelations come which seem not the result 
of work but of inspiration ; so that I do what I 
cannot do, for it is not I that do it, but my friend 



134. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

that liveth in me. For every feeling of love, the 
Talmud tells us, gives birth involuntarily to an 
invisible genius or spirit which yearns to complete 
its existence. So when we come into emotional 
contact with the living God, we experience His 
creative power, we feel that He is making some- 
thing different of us, and yet not something dif- 
ferent. He is simply making us ourselves. For as 
in all love we go out of ourselves to find ourselves, 
so in love for God we go out of ourselves to find 
ourselves in God. Thus we "come to ourselves," 
we begin to "apprehend that for which we have 
been apprehended of Christ Jesus," we begin to 
be perfect, that is made through and through 
after our own design, each one the perfect ex- 
pression of God's thought of him, the fulfilment 
of the idea which God had in mind in creating 
him. And becoming ourselves, we lose all pre- 
tense, — we become perfectly simple, perfectly sin- 
cere, for we see that the ideal of life is not to pre- 
tend to be what we are not, but to be ourselves, — 
our best selves. Moreover we are conscious that 
we are in the Presence of the Infinite, and in that 
presence all shams vanish. 

We talk sometimes about the imitation of 
Christ, but love is not imitative, love is creative. 
I do not imitate my friend, but through contact 
with her I become more myself, know my own 
powers better and exercise them more. We can 
imitate without love that which we have decided 
that it is desirable to imitate ; sometimes a period 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 135 

of conscious imitation may wisely precede the cre- 
ative period, but that is before we really love, 
when we only feel that we ought to love. We 
probably can imitate better when we do not love 
than when we do love, for imitation is cold, crea- 
tion is warm, it is our life-blood that we put into 
it. Indeed, when we become truly creative, we 
lose all power of imitation, for we cannot be real 
and artificial, dead and alive, at the same time. 
Just as the eifect of a masterpiece upon an orig- 
inal spirit is not to make him try and imitate it, 
but try and do something else which arises in his 
own mind, so the effect of an appreciation of the 
revelation of God in Christ upon us is not to make 
us do what Christ did, but to have the same mind 
in us which was also in Christ Jesus. And in this 
emotional creative love all thought of duty disap- 
pears ; the artist creates, expresses himself, not 
from a sense of duty, but out of the pure joy of 
creation, because he cannot help himself; so the 
lover, whether of God or man, creates, finds the 
best expression for himself, not out of a sense of 
duty, but because he too cannot help himself, out 
of the pure joy of creation. 

Yet while creation is more joyful than is imita- 
tion, it takes more strength, but love supplies the 
needed strength. For just as love of the creature 
leads to energy and concentration, so love of God 
leads to energj;^ and concentration. And just as 
earthly love gives physical strength because it 
gives happiness, and no doctor possesses the cura- 



136 IN CAMBRII>GE BACKS 

tive power that is latent in a spark of happiness, 
so the love of God, being the supreme source of 
happiness, must also be the supreme source of 
physical strength, for, as Amiel puts it, "the high- 
est happiness is nothing but the conquest of God 
through love." "The joy of the Lord is your 
strength." "They that wait upon Jehovah shall 
renew their strength ; they shall mount upon wings 
as eagles ; they shall run, and not be weary ; they 
shall walk and not faint." 

But while self-development certainly comes 
from this emotional heart-love, I am not so sure 
that self-control comes from it in equal measure. 
That I am inclined to think is more the result of 
loving God with the will. "The great idea of 
duty," Goethe tells us, "alone can keep us up- 
right," and his testimony is the more valuable, 
since it comes from one who in his inmost being 
hated and resented the idea of duty. Yet even 
here the heart does play its part, to some ex- 
tent it helps us to self-control, but to an even 
greater extent it helps us by making self- 
control in great measure unnecessary. That 
is we abstain from that which we ought not 
to do, chiefly because mind and heart are 
so filled with that which we ought to do. "If 
the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free in- 
deed," free I take it even from temptation to sin, 
because the heart will be so filled with the desire 
for righteousnes. When love is perfect, the ex- 
hortation "Love God and do as you please" is a 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 137 

proper one, for then we shall please only what God 
pleases. When Dante found himself through lov- 
ing Beatrice, he tells us that 

" already my desire and will were turned, even as 
a wheel revolving evenly 
By the love that moves the sun and other stars." 

And I cannot see how real, intense love, whether 
for God or man can fail to kill all desire for the 
grosser forms of sin. Love is the great purifier ; 
one of the first things which creative love creates 
is the clean heart. 

There is one sin which I find that strong human 
friendship certainly does help me to refrain from ; 
if there has been in me any tendency toward bit- 
terness, I put it aside when real love comes to me ; 
I cannot love my friend with all my heart and be 
bitter toward anyone. In "Sandra Belloni" Mere- 
dith represents Merthyr Powys as saying that love 
for Italy has made it impossible for him to hate 
even Austria, Italy's enemy. When Beatrice sa- 
luted Dante a "flame of charity possessed him, 
which made him pardon whosoever had offended 
him." So love toward God and bitterness toward 
man cannot exist side by side. "By this shall all 
men know that ye are my disciples if ye have love 
one toward another." "My spirit is too glad and 
great," says Luther, "for me to be at heart an 
enemy toward anyone." "Praised be my Lord," 
says St. Francis, "for those who pardon one an- 
other for His love's sake." 



138 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

Then if I have faults that especially hurt my 
friend, if I realize that they hurt her, love makes 
me put forth especial efforts to conquer them. 
For after all most of us do not sorrow for sin be- 
cause it is sin, but because it has hurt someone, 
especially someone whom we love ; few of us would 
grieve over a wrong action that so far as we could 
see had hurt no one ; indeed, it might be difficult 
for us to realize that it was sin. But when we 
come to realize the personal God, and to have a 
heart-love for Him, we shall feel that all sin must 
be guarded against, for every sin especially hurts 
God since all sin stands in the way of that for 
which He lives, the coming of His kingdom. So 
after each sin, we shall know the bitterness of the 
Psalmist's cry, "Against Thee, Thee only have I 
sinned," and after each sin we will pray his 
prayer, "Renew a right spirit within me," 

Still after all is said I believe that heart-love 
is inspiring rather than controlling. We are in- 
spired to do that which is right, we are not in- 
spired to abstain from that which is wrong. 
Here the will must play its part ; even when the 
heart moves the will, the action of the latter is 
conscious and sometimes painful. But while, so 
long as we are here, self-control is as important 
as is self-development, and frequently the neces- 
sary condition of self-development, I am inclined 
to think that it is the lower of the two virtues. 
For while the obligation to self-control is prob- 
ably temporary, the obligation to self-develop- 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 139 

ment is eternal; under the "ultimate angels' law" 
we shall indulge every instinct of the soul 

"There where life, law, joy, impulse are one thing." 

It is only "when the fight begins within himself 
that a man's worth somewhat" ; we are "never to 
leave fighting till the life to come," but in the life 
to come we probably shall leave it. And it is in 
these exalted moments of conscious emotional love 
for God that we anticipate "the ultimate angels' 
law." 

Thus far I have tried to describe heart-love at 
its best, but there is another side to the picture. 
This is the love which, as we have seen, is the es- 
pecial mark of saintliness, and it is in the lives 
of the mediaeval saints that it is exhibited not 
only in its strength, but also in its weakness. For 
it cannot be denied that even making allowance for 
the difference in the centuries, and admitting that 
the mission of certain people may be to emphasize 
certain virtues even at the expense of being one- 
sided, the lives of the saints are frequently dis- 
appointing. We often find in them an imagi- 
native absorption in the love of God which seems 
to cut them off from all human usefulness : souls 
sit and sing themselves away to everlasting bliss, 
as though religion were nothing but an emotional 
debauch, and as though the only service of God 
were adulation. 

The trouble is not far to seek ; for the tempera- 



140 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

ment of the saint is the same as that of the artist. 
Before he becomes a saint, that is before his ex- 
cessive emotional nature fastens itself upon God, 
he is subject to the same grosser temptations as 
those to which the artist is subject. After he be- 
comes a saint, his temptations are the more re- 
fined and subtle temptations which beset the artist, 
especially the temptation to live apart from real- 
ity. As the artist is sometimes absorbed in art 
to the exclusion of everything else, so the saint is 
sometimes absorbed in love to the exclusion of 
everything else. But just as the art of the artist 
who separates himself from the world is generally 
very limited, so the love of the saint who separates 
himself from the world is generally very imperfect, 
for it is of the heart alone, intellect and will do 
not play their part. Just as there is danger in 
human friendship in which heart and soul are not 
balanced by mind and will, so there is danger in 
such a friendship with God. Love, whether it be 
love for God or man, demands the whole being, 
else it is not love. Love which is of the heart 
alone is not even good heart love. 

If I love my friend I must be with her, must be 
alone with her at times, so if I love God I must be 
with Him, must be alone with Him at times. 
Sometimes at the beginning of a great earthly 
love the disposition is to give up a considerable 
period of time not to working but to loving, and 
if this be a preparation, a gathering of strength 
and inspiration for future work, it is well. Some- 



FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 141 

times too when wearied by work it is good to stop 
awhile, and to give ourselves up to love. And 
what is good in human friendship is good also 
in Divine friendship. St. Paul spent three years 
in Arabia. Many Christians find it well to go 
occasionally into retreat, all true lovers of God 
will want to be alone with Him at times. Yet St. 
Francis and some others of the better balanced 
saints have recognized the desire to live perma- 
nently with God, apart from the world, as one of 
the sorest temptations that could come to them. 
For just as there may be a tendency toward a 
sentimental human friendship, so there may be a 
tendency toward a sentimental friendship with 
God. A friendship that is mere reveling in emo- 
tion, that separates me from work, that practi- 
cally separates me from my fellows, even although 
it may arouse a sentimental tenderness for them, 
that mjakes me always desire to be alone with my 
friend, whose perfect congeniality makes uncon- 
genial and irritating people even more uncongenial 
and irritating, is weakening and immoral. So 
an emotional love for God that does not help us 
to do our work and love our neighbor is weakening 
and immoral. 

For a friend is one who helps me to do and to be 
my best, friendship is union in great interests, its 
chief glory is fellow-work. So friendship with 
God will make us not idle dreamers, but co-workers 
with Him. We work with Him, not for Him. I 
would like to do things for my friends, but there 



142 IN CAJVIBRIDGE BACKS 

is very seldom anything that I can do, so my love 
for them expresses itself in doing my daily work 
more enthusiastically. Should not love for God 
find similar expression? Work can never really 
separate me from a friend, never interrupt com- 
munion with her, for though her body may be 
thousands of miles away, her spirit is closest to 
me when I am working most earnestly and most 
joyously. So do we not after all find our best 
communion with God in work? If St. Francis had 
tried very long living with God apart from the 
world, he would have found that he was not even 
with God. Labor are est or are. 

In the King James' Version of the New Testa- 
ment Jesus is represented as saying "Be ye there- 
fore perfect, even as your Father which is in 
Heaven is perfect"; in the Revision the command 
is turned into a promise, "Ye shall therefore be 
perfect." Is the command to love the Lord our 
God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all 
our mind, and with all our strength also a promise? 



VIII 

IMMORTALITY 

In the course of my illness this summer I have 
been more than once under the influence of ether. 
The first time it made a great impression upon 
me. Two classmates, both very dear friends, 
were with me for some hours before ; they accom^ 
panied me to the door of the operating room ; 
then the one bade me an affectionate farewell, 
while the other, a woman physician, went in with 
me and held my hand while the ether was being 
administered. When I came to myself, I was in 
my own room, my doctor friend was with me tend- 
erly caring for me, while on my table were letters 
and flowers from other friends. I had a feeling 
that I had somehow undergone a great change, 
that I had in fact been dead and comie to life 
again, and that the new life was better and sweeter 
than the old had been. Since then I have liked 
to dwell upon that experience, upon the love that 
was the last thing of which I was conscious before 
I went to sleep, and the love that was the first 
thing of which I was conscious when I awoke. 
And I have wondered if when death really comes 
to me it will not be like that, just a passing from 
love to love. If it is not that, I feel that I cannot 
143 



144 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

bear to die, and neither can I bear to live, for if 
"all fairest things are doomed to swiftest death," 
I cannot choose but "weep to have that which I 
fear to lose." 

I have a friend with whom I have sometimes dis- 
cussed the subject of personal immortality, and 
she tells me that there is a sense in which she 
could be content, if it were necessary, to give up 
the hope of existence beyond the grave, that since 
she is absolutely sure of the goodness of a God 
who loves us, she knows that He will do what is 
best for us, and if He denies us the immortality 
which we crave, she can believe that that too is 
love ; for some reason known only to Him it is not 
good that we should have it, and so she can say 
with Mr. A. C. Benson "Even if death is an end, 
an extinction, the thought does not afflict me — I 
am in the Father's hands. The Father's arm is 
strong, and His heart is very large." I confess 
that if it came to a choice, I would prefer giving up 
a personal God to giving up personal immortality. 
For whether there is a loving All-Father or not, 
I could never doubt Matthew Arnold's "Power not 
ourselves that makes for righteousness," I am 
sure of that because of what I feel within myself, 
and because of what I see around me. For I find 
that all the experiences of life are means of 
growth, sometimes I think almost irrespective of 
the way in which I take them. Some things I 
have borne well, others I have borne badly, yet 
when they have passed I find that through all I 



IMMORTALITY 145 

have grown. Doubtless I should have grown more 
had I borne everything well, yet even as it is I 
have grown. This Power plus immortality Avould 
mean more to me than a God who, I was told, loved 
me, without immortality. Indeed I find such a 
God unthinkable. For if God loves us, and yet 
the soul is not immortal there are so many people 
to whom He gives so little sign of loving, who 
could not possibly believe that He loves them for 
anything that they can see here. I have had 
more reasons than most people have had for be- 
lieving that God is love. Some of the things 
that I have wanted to have have been given to me 
to have, some of the things that I have wanted to 
do have been granted to me to do ; when I have 
been denied that which I wanted to have, or that 
which I wanted to do, I have sometimes been able 
to see a reason for it, so that in time it has been 
possible for me to say understandingly "It is 
better so." But what of the lives full of promise 
that have been cut off early.? I do not speak of 
those who die in infancy, for while from one point 
of view their lives seem sheer waste, it might be 
argued that they are born and die for their par- 
ents' sake. But what of the youths full of talent 
and enthusiasm, perhaps even of genius, who have 
passed away when just ready to begin their life 
work? The only reason that we can possibly see 
which would justify a loving God in allowing such 
lives to become extinct, is that there was some 
great evil ahead of them, which He saw but we 



146 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

could not see ; some evil so great that eternal 
death was better than such suffering. But the 
answer to this is that if He is God and All-Power- 
ful, He could have averted the evil; we are shut 
up then to the conclusion that if He allows such 
lives to pass into nothingness, He is lacking either 
in love or in power: — that is, He is not God. 

Then there are lives that are cut off in the midst 
of a great experience, before they have had time 
to learn the lesson that the experience should 
teach ; the lesson, for instance, that sin should 
teach. For I believe that even our sins are in 
God's hands, part of His ordering for us. For 
to the growing nature, growth often comes out 
of yielding to temptation, a different kind but 
perhaps as great a growth as comes from resist- 
ing it. So while it does not diminish our sin and 
responsibility, in the larger scheme of things I 
believe that God means us to yield, that He some- 
times has a lesson for us that yielding to tempta- 
tion will teach, and that resisting would not have 
taught. The author of the fifty-first Psalm had 
learned some things that only sin could teach, and 
when he had learned his lesson he was able to teach 
it to all the generations of men that should come 
after. But there are souls, beautiful growing 
souls like the Psalmist's, that are cut off just at 
the moment of yielding. There is no chance for 
them to learn sin's lesson here ; is there no other 
place where they can learn it? 

In this world too punishment is not in propor- 



IMMORTALITY 147 

tion to sin ; we frequently pay heavier penalties 
for bad judgment than we do for bad morals ; the 
sins which spring fromi the excesses of human na- 
ture are more severely punished than those which 
spring from its deficiencies, yet we all feel that the 
former indicate a larger and more generous na- 
ture than do the latter. Is there no place where 
the balance will be set right? 

Again the lives that seem most pitiful to me are 
the naturally aspiring but empty lives, the lives 
for instance, of many unmarried and some mar- 
ried women of a generation ago ; women who were 
denied both satisfying love and inspiring work, 
because they were born too soon, and both en- 
vironment and lack of training prevented them 
from shaping full lives for themselves. Such 
lives are to me infinitely more pitiful than are 
those to whom great sorrow and suffering has 
come, for suffering is in itself part of the richness 
of life. But who shall estimate the dreariness of 
the life to which both joy and sorrow have been 
denied? the pain not of having lost, but of never 
having had? In thinking of such souls I have 
found comfort in an experience of my own. 
There were two years of my life which seemed 
an utter blank to me, no joy, no growth, but 
when they were over and I was far enough re- 
moved from them to look back upon them, I felt 
that they had been the two most fruitful years 
that I had known, and I thanked God for them. 
And I have wondered whether those to whom not 



148 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

only two years but the whole life has seemed 
empty, may not when life is over and they are 
able to look back upon it, have a similar experi- 
ence, whether the Psalmist could have had such 
an experience in mind when he wrote "I shall be 
satisfied when I awake in Thy likeness," satisfied 
with the apparent emptiness, because he could see 
a reason for it? But if such an one never wakes 
up, how shall he be satisfied? Is there no place 
where such a woman, — it is generally a woman — 
can "open her mouth wide and He will fill it?" 
fill it if need be with even some of the pain that 
she has missed here? 

And what of the submerged tenth or more than 
a tenth, born in the slums, some of them perhaps 
with aspirations of which they themselves are ig- 
norant? forced to think of nothing save "What 
shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and where- 
withal shall we be clothed?" and then, alas! not 
always obtaining food and drink and clothing! 
Then there are whole races to whom apparently 
no chance has been given. When I was a little 
girl I heard a story which some African tribes, — 
I know not which ones, — tell among themselves in 
order to account for the differences in races. I 
will tell it as I remember it. "When God first 
created man," so these poor savages say, "he 
created a white man, and it was very early in the 
morning. So God said 'It is early, and I have 
plenty of time; sit down and I will teach you some 
things.* And God taught the white man how to 



IMMORTALITY 149 

make houses, ships, cloth and many other things 
until the white man knew nearly as much as God 
knew. Then he made another man, — a man be- 
longing to our highest tribe, and God said to him, 
'Well, it is still fairly early, sit down, and I will 
teach you some things.' So God taught him some 
things, not so many as he taught the white man, 
but still a good many. And so each man that was 
created was taught fewer things, until at last God 
created a man belonging to our lowest tribe, and 
to him He said, 'Well, it is very late, I have no 
time to talk to you. Go and catch fish, perhaps 
sometime I will come back.' God has not come 
back yet, so that man still knows nothing, except 
how to catch fish." Perhaps God will come back 
to that lowest tribe sometime ; if He does it will 
be well for the generation to which He comes, but 
what of the generations of men who have died 
knowing nothing save how to catch fish? What 
too of our ancestors who died in savagery, know- 
ing nothing of the higher joys of life, and 
scarcely anything of the lower.'' We are told 
sometimes that the object of creation, of life, is 
not the perfection of the individual, but the per- 
fection of the race. But can we believe that God 
loves one generation so much more than another 
that He would sacrifice thousands of generations 
to the perfection of one ultimate generation? 
Nay, rather if God is love, must we not all, all 
generations, all races, all individuals "come in the 
unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son 



150 IN CA]\IBRIDGE BACKS 

of God unto the perfect man, unto the measure of 
the stature of the fulness of Christ?" 

Then these aspirations which we all have, and 
which cannot be fulfilled here, do not these too 
point toward immortality ? Take the accomplish- 
ment of him who has accomplished the most, is it 
not only a small fraction of that to which he as- 
pires? Thus our failures here are "but a tri- 
umph's evidence for the fulness of the days." 
And life must last not a short time after death, 
but forever, since the blessed truth is that our as- 
pirations will never be satisfied. For the happi- 
ness of life consists not in having, but in wanting, 
and the spiritual man is so constituted that his 
aspirations will always be ahead of his attainment, 
his "reach will always exceed his grasp." 

"We do not see it where it is, 
At the beginning of the race; 
As we proceed it shifts its place, 
And where we looked for crowns to fall, 
We find the tug's to come, — that's all." 

But if our failures, failures which, thank God, 
are to continue to all eternity, are an argument 
in favor of immortality, no less are our successes. 
For not only prophets, poets, artists and musi- 
cians, but even those to whom they spake have 
shared God's thoughts with Him, have lived in 
rapturous communion with God, walking and talk- 
ing with Him as a man talketh with his friend. 
Could we love or even respect a God who dropped 



IMMORTALITY 151 

his friends, the sharer of his thoughts into utter 
nothingness? or even absorbed their individuality 
in Himself? We are not God, nor part of God; 
we are friends of God, and such we must ever be. 
This new spirit of mechanical invention too, the 
marvelous power which man is acquiring over na- 
ture, which has not only increased our physical 
comfort in so many ways, but has also vastly mul- 
tiplied our intellectual interests, is not this too an 
evidence of immortality? For if we are Christians 
believing in the continuous inspiration of the Holy 
Spirit as the source of civilization, we shall rec- 
ognize that the God who has spoken to us so often 
in the past through poets, musicians and painters, 
is now perhaps speaking to us most clearly 
through the scientist, and that the spirit great 
enough to transmit or even to understand the 
wonderful message must be immortal. So too the 
being in a foreign country, or even reading or 
speaking a foreign language brings me this sense 
of immortality. For the broadening of experi- 
ence, the living so to speak in a new world and 
adapting myself to it, gives me the feeling that 
the mind which is capable of such enlargement, 
must have endless enlargement awaiting it, must 
live forever. 

But perhaps nothing gives me this assurance of 
an endless life so strongly as the making of a new 
friend. An experience so broadening, so deepen- 
ing, so uplifting as love must surely last forever. 
I have known people who because they had no 



152 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

strong sense of immortality were afraid to make 
close friends, lest they should lose them. I do not 
wonder; when I was a little girl, I wanted a bird, 
but was afraid to have it lest it should die. If I 
do not believe that my friend and I are immortal, 
I cannot enjoy her even while I have her She is 
meadows, sun and breeze to me, but of what avail 
would be meadows, sun and breeze, if I did not be- 
lieve in God, if I did not believe in immortality? 
The very passion with which I enter upon a 
friendship, the newness of life which comes to me 
with it, is to me an argument in favor of immor- 
tality, but most of all the aspiration that comes 
with it. When I love I want to do something for 
the object of miy love, but I think that even more 
than that I want to make my own life higher and 
better, more worthy of my love. The dog too 
loves his master, and wishes to please him, but be- 
yond that his love kindles no aspiration in him. 
In man alone is love what Mazzini says that it 
should be, "the union of souls that aspire, the 
flight of the soul toward God." When we really 
love, love in the full sense of the word, we "lift up 
our hearts" and when we lift up our hearts, con- 
sciously or unconsciously we "lift them up to 
Him." 

And then there is the unrequited love; is not 
part of the reason that love is xmrequited to be 
found in the fact that earthly love is partly physi- 
cal, that it must find physical expression.? I can- 
not believe that I can ever feel a spiritual affinity 



IMMORTALITY 153 

toward a person without that affinity really ex- 
isting; some day she whom I love will come to see 
it, will acknowledge it in eternity if not in time. 
Here she is slow to perceive it, perhaps because I 
cannot find the right expression for the spiritual 
that is in me, or perhaps she knows that it exists, 
but because of physical limitations she cannot re- 
spond; perhaps while I suit her spiritually, I do 
not suit her physically, tire her when I should 
rest her. There there will be no bodies, or at 
least no bodies that can be wearied. Or she may 
already have so many friends that there is no time 
or strength for another; there time and strength 
will not be limited. So in the next life I shall have 
the love that I have missed in this, 

"for God above 
Is great to grant as mighty to make 

And creates the love to reward the love, 
I claim you still for my own love's sake." 

When I speak of immortality it is personal im- 
mortality that I mean ; for no other immortality 
should I care. If I am to survive, it must be I, — 
I \\dth the memory of my past, with all the ties 
that were formed here on earth, for if I have no 
memory of my existence here, I might just as well 
become extinct, and another spirit be created. I 
know that there are thinkers like Mr. Maeterlinck 
who believe that spirit is indestructible in the same 
sense in which they believe that matter is in- 
destructible; that is, that at death it is absorbed 



154 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

into the sum total of spirit. I find Mr. Maeter- 
linck's position more logical than Mr. Benson's. 
For Mr. Benson finds no difficulty in believing in 
a personal God, who is All-Love and All-Power, 
yet thinks it possible that this powerful, loving 
God may for some reason deny us personal im- 
mortality. I maintain that if God, a Person, loves 
me as a Person, my personality must survive ; that 
anything else is unthinkable. But Mr. Maeter- 
linck denies personality to God in so many words, 
and when we read his essays and see to what an 
extent he believes the spiritual life to be based 
upon the physical, and when we read his dramas 
and see how his people are the playthings of Fate, 
we feel that he all but denies personality to man. 
A wise teacher of mine taught me to define a per- 
son as one who has the power to choose. In that 
sense Mr. Maeterlinck's "Pelleas and Melisande" 
certainly are not persons ; their actions and des- 
tiny are governed entirely by blind Fate. Now 
if we deny personality to both man and God, it 
follows as a matter of course that there can be no 
personal immortality; we who are not persons 
here cannot be persons anywhere else ; the only im- 
mortality possible for us is to be absorbed in the 
impersonal God. Accept Mr. Maeterlinck's prem- 
ises, and his conclusions follow naturally. 

And I do not know how his premises can be ab- 
solutely proved false; the line of argument which 
attracts me most is that suggested by Mr. Ches- 
terton. He points out that there is no way by 



IMMORTALITY 155 

which we can answer the mad man logically, for 
his explanation of a thing is always complete, and 
often in a purely rational sense satisfactory, or 
at least it is unanswerable. "If a man says for 
instance that certain men have a conspiracy 
against him, you cannot dispute it except by say- 
ing that the men deny that they are conspirators, 
which is exactly what conspirators would do. Or 
if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no ar- 
gument to tell him that the world denies his di- 
vinity, for the world denied Christ's. But speak- 
ing quite externally and empirically, we may say 
that the strongest and most unmistakable mark 
of madness is the combination between a logical 
completeness and a spiritual contraction. The 
lunatic's explanation explains, but it does not ex- 
plain in a large way. The best way to answer 
the lunatic who believed that his neighbors were 
conspiring against him would be to say, suppose 
we grant the details ; perhaps when the man in 
the street did not seem to see you, it was only his 
cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked him 
his name, it was only because he knew it already. 
But how much happier you would be if you only 
knew that these people cared nothing about you ! 
How much larger your life would be if your self 
could become smaller in it !" Or to the madman 
who called himself Christ, "So you are the creator 
of the world ! but what a small world it must be ! 
What a little heaven you must inhabit with an- 
gels no bigger than butterflies !" 



156 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

And as a matter of fact that is the way that 
wise doctors and nurses do talk to the insane. 
They do not say, "Your position is absolutely 
without foundation," but "see where it lands you." 
Now see where Mr. Maeterlinck's position lands 
him. Not only does it shut out personal immor- 
tality, but see where it lands him in this life. 
Fate determined the destiny of "Pclleas and Meli- 
sande" and will determine the destiny of Meli- 
sande's daughter. That is, having no power to 
choose, they have not really sinned, the most dis- 
mal of all doctrines. To my mind the immorality 
of the drama does not lie in the fact that the love 
therein depicted was unlawful, that at least is the 
smallest part of it, but in the fact that it was 
such a vile thing even had it been lawful ; a purely 
physical and sensuous thing without a spark of 
aspiration in it. I find the sensuosity in this case 
even worse than sensuality, for in the latter there 
is often a certain kind of strength; here there is 
nothing but weakness. Mr. Maeterlinck tries to 
make us see that the lower animals are almost up 
to man's level. He succeeds in making us see, 
that admit his premises, man is almost down to 
the level of the beasts. 

I had a college acquaintance who startled me 
the first time that she called upon me, by telling 
me that she was looking forward with the greatest 
of pleasure to the time when she should get rid of 
her body, for most of her troubles and most of her 
faults came to her through her body. The re- 



IMMORTALITY 157 

mark made an impression upon me, partly because 
it was such an unusual statement for a young girl 
to make (there was something about her which 
made it impossible to doubt her sincerity) and 
partly because it was not long before her wish was 
granted ; she did get rid of her body. But I can- 
not say that I sympathize with her now any more 
than I did then ; it seems to me that the spirit owes 
so much to the body that I can hardly imagine it 
as continuing to exist without the body. All 
knowledge and all feeling come to us at first 
through the body, and all expression of knowledge 
and feeling is through the body. Most of our 
temptations come to us, directly or indirectly, 
through the body, which is equivalent to saying 
that our moral characters come to us through the 
body, since "as there is nothing good save the good 
will," without temptation moral character would 
be impossible. And the care which the body re- 
quires, the struggle for material things which it 
necessitates, although it may seem an impediment, 
is the means by which the spirit is disciplined. 
The people who live in fertile countries where 
physical wants are easily supplied generally de- 
velop less morally than do those who live in a 
country where the means of subsistence are more 
difficult to obtain. Even the weak body may be 
an advantage, for the regular life which the weak 
have to live in order to live at all may make them 
so systematic that they accomplish more than the 
average strong person does, while the discipline 



158 IN CAlNIBRtDGE BACKS 

of suffering frequently gives a sweetness of spirit 
and a quickness of sympathy rarely found among 
the physically strong. Moreover physical limita- 
tions often define our way by cutting off m,any 
tempting possibilities ; thus the whole life is con- 
centrated on that which it can do best, and in 
the long run counts for more than it would, had 
its energies been dissipated in a variety of direc- 
tions. I have a very ardent love of study, of the 
acquisition of knowledge, and I sometimes think 
that I might have been a mere cram, had not 
weakness of the flesh forced me to take seasons 
to reflect. The teacher whom I have quoted be- 
fore used to say, "The Sabbath was given to us 
to protect us against narrowness." I suppose she 
meant that if we did not have our Sabbath rest, 
each would become so absorbed in his own little 
piece of work that he would be unable to see it in 
its relation to the whole. I have sometimes 
thought that my weak body was given to me for 
a similar reason, to protect me from the narrow- 
ness which a mere accumulation of facts en- 
genders. So with the poet I can say "nor soul 
helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul," and 
with the Apostle I can say that I "desire not to 
be unclothed, but clothed upon." 

But perhaps a time will come when the body has 
given to the spirit all that it has to give, a time 
when it can no longer help but impede, and then 
like all institutions that have been useful, but have 
survived their usefulness, the monastery and the 



IMMORTALITY 159 

feudal system for instance, it must give way, the 
mind can get on without it. Even here we very 
soon discover that while the bodily organs are 
witnesses from whose testimony we must form our 
conception of Truth, they are deceptive witnesses ; 
it is only through thought and reason that we at- 
tain to accurate knowledge of what they witness. 
That is we can, as Plato puts it, attain to real 
truth only when we approach it "with the eye of 
the mind alone, not allowing when in the act of 
thought the intrusion or introduction of sight or 
any other sense in the company of reason, but 
with the very light of the mind in her clearness 
penetrating into the very heart of truth." A 
time may come when it is no longer necessary for 
the body to furnish to the mind the imperfect data 
upon which it reasons, when the spirit has learned 
all that it can learn from the body, when the body 
in turn has expressed all that the spirit has 
learned from it that it can express ; then even a 
strong and perfect body would impede, and the 
body when it has performed its mission does not 
stay strong and perfect ; it begins to decay. It 
is true that the mind seems at times to decay with 
it, that even the moral nature sometimes seems to 
give way, and this often makes us feel that since 
the spirit weakens as the body weakens, it must 
die when the body dies. But perhaps the soul 
just goes to sleep to wake up again refreshed. 
Nor does mental and moral decay always accom- 
pany physical decay. Have we not all known 



160 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

people who while the outward man perished the 
inward man was renewed day by day? 

Jesus Christ had not the slightest doubt of im- 
mortality. He found it proved even in the writ- 
ings of Moses. With fullest confidence he could 
say "I go to prepare a place for you." When I 
was a child I was taken to an artist's studio to see 
some pictures which he had had on exhibition in 
Paris. He told us that while there he had over- 
heard a Frenchman criticise the brilliancy with 
which he had depicted the autumn foliage of a New 
England forest ; such coloring, the critic said, did 
not exist in nature. To which another Frenchman 
replied, "Do you see that sky? The man who 
could paint a sky like that would not make a mis- 
take about other things." Jesus Christ was so 
right about all the things of which I can judge, 
I feel that I can trust Him not to make a mistake 
about the things of which I cannot judge. For 
the more I think about the teachings of Jesus and 
compare them with those of other teachers, the 
more am I struck with the truth of the saying 
"Never man so spake." Those who bore this 
testimony had perhaps not heard many great 
teachers, could not compare him, as the fashion 
now is, with Buddha, Confucius or Socrates, but 
if they had been able to do so, I think that their 
verdict would have been the same. How wonder- 
ful it is that in that age He never said anything 
that could offend the morality, or even the taste 
of the twentieth century! It is true that here 



IMMORTALITY 161 

and there there are pages of Plato that compare 
well with the teachings of Christ, the parable at 
the end of the Gorgias, the cave-figure in the Re- 
public, parts of the Symposium, the Phaedo and 
the Phaedrus, but turn over a few pages, we will 
almost invariably find something which, tried by 
modern standards of either morals or taste, must 
be condemned. And the impression which Socrates 
himself made upon his contemporaries, how differ- 
ent from that made by Jesus ! Simon Peter cast 
his fisher's coat about him, fell at Jesus' feet and 
said, "Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful 
man." Alcibiades loved and admired Socrates, 
and yet not only was he not recalled from vice by 
him, but he even expected him to share in his 
vices, and when he was not successful he gave him 
credit for being a paragon of virtue, but never 
thought of imitating him. Would Alcibiades have 
dreamed of tempting Jesus? 

So much for the matter of Jesus' teaching. 
What about the manner? He taught "as one 
having authority, not as the scribes." He never 
had any doubts as to what He taught. He is sim- 
ple, authoritative, brief. Socrates is fantastic, 
tentative, his gold is imbedded in page after page 
of fanciful and bewildering parable. One does 
not quite know what he meant, probably because 
he himself did not quite know. How many more of 
his sayings we have than we have of Christ's, and 
yet on how much fewer of the problems of life 
does he really throw light ! He is always feeling 



162 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

his way, not sure himself of what he says. Jesus 
speaks with absolute certainty, there is no room 
for any other opinion. "If it were not so, I 
would have told you." Socrates thinks, Jesus 
knows, Socrates reasons, Jesus sees. I do not 
say that there never was a time when Jesus had to 
think things out, the statement that He increased 
in wisdom as He increased in stature, may imply 
that there was, but from the time that His say- 
ings are recorded. He spake only that which He 
knew. It is just because Christ's thought is so 
fuU-grown, His knowledge so absolute, that it 
seems so simple. The process of searching for 
truth is often a complicated one, but Truth when 
found is always simple. 

Indeed I have sometimes thought that perhaps 
the reason that a certain type of intellectual peo- 
ple prefer Socrates to Jesus is that they do not 
like that absolute certainty, they have a weakness 
for intellectual processes. I remember that when 
I first taught sociology and the subject was com- 
paratively new to me, I was constantly making 
statements which on further thought, I would 
modify or even contradict. I remarked to one of 
my pupils that I hoped that in another year when 
I was more mistress of my material, I would not 
do this so much. She replied, "Then I am^ glad 
that I am in your class this year ; I like to feel the 
teacher think." That girl was more interested in 
my mind, and in its action upon her mind, than in 
the subject matter; perhaps legitimately so, since 



IMMORTALITY 163 

the object of education is more mental development 
than knowledge. So the scholar sometimes pre- 
fers Socrates to Christ, because he is in the period 
of his life in which intellectual processes mean 
more to him than do matters of life and death. 
But when the time comes that he needs Christ to 
do "more for him than a mere man can," He may 
"stand confessed as the God of Salvation." For 
when it comes to matters of vital importance, we 
want the man who knows, not the man who is 
thinking them out. So when we ask what lies be- 
yond life and death, we are glad that Jesus knew 
rather than thought. 

The question has often been discussed as to how 
far the Platonic Socrates corresponds to the real 
Socrates. One thing at least is true: Plato was 
Socrates' intellectual and spiritual equal, and 
therefore capable of creating him. Nor is it likely 
that he would have hesitated to put his own opin- 
ion into the mouth of his master ; he would have 
reasoned that all that he thought was really due 
to Socrates, for without Socrates he would never 
have thought at all. And ancient plagiarism — 
if plagiarism it can be called — was more noble 
than modern plagiarism — it consisted in attrib- 
uting one's own thoughts to someone else, 
whereas modem plagiarism desires that someone's 
else thoughts be attributed to one's self. That 
is, the plagiarist of antiquity was anxious that the 
thought should spread ; if it would spread better 
by giving someone else the credit for it, by all 



164 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

means let him have it ; the modern plagiarist wishes 
not the thought, but his own fame to spread. But 
the disciples of Jesus, poor unlettered fishermen, 
were not capable of inventing Jesus, Plato himself 
would not have been capable of it. Take the story 
of his birth alone. Other religions tell us of sons 
of God born of mortal women, but how vulgar are 
these stories of actual sexual intercourse between 
mortals and immortals ! Contrast them with St. 
Luke's vision, "The Holy Ghost shall come upon 
thee, and the power of the Highest shall over- 
shadow thee; therefore that holy thing which is 
bom of thee shall be called the Son of God." A 
fisherman or an obscure physician invent that, in 
that age of bad morals and bad taste.'' 

And yet when all is said, the heart will cry out, 
If we could only be sure, it would be so much easier 
to bear the loss of our loved ones, so much easier 
to live ourselves ! Perhaps if we could be sure we 
should not live at all. For living means for a 
hmnan being making choices ; if there were ab- 
solutely certainty, not only would there be no 
room for faith, there would also be no room for 
moral choice; we should be so overshadowed by 
God, that it would not be possible for us to exer- 
cise our own wills. Perhaps we have been at times 
in the presence of a great person, and have felt 
stifled, no room to think, no room to will, no room 
to act, no room to live. What if we were in the 
unveiled presence of God? Yes, it is well that He 
should withdraw Himself, that He should be the 



IMMORTALITY 165 

"invisible God" in order that He may leave "room 
for the newly made to live," which means room for 
them "to fall into divers temptations," since 
this is necessary if we would be "perfect and entire, 
lacking nothing." Yes, it may have its use even 
that we are sometimes forced to cry out with 
Jesus, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me?" A passage in Mrs. Ward's "Lady Rose's 
Daughter" strikes me very forcibly. Julie has 
been telling Jacob of her past life. Mrs. Ward 
says "Jacob listened very humbly. How could 
he ever be her equal in experience?" He was too 
sure of the presence of God — too protected by 
that assurance. Such characters are beautiful, 
but do we not sometimes feel that they are a little 
lacking in development? Is it too much to say 
that before we can attain to full-grown perfection 
we need to experience even that sense of desertion 
which was necessary to His perfection? God does 
not desert us any more than He deserted Christ, 
but perhaps it is necessary for us, for some of us 
at least, that we should feel that horror of great 
darkness, that emptiness and loneliness which He 
felt. 

"They have Moses and the prophets ; if they will 
not hear them, neither will they be converted (nor 
convinced) though one rose from the dead." If 
historical evidence can be accepted. One has risen 
from the dead. And miore than the accounts of 
His resurrection, the transformation of the lives 
of His followers is proof that He did rise. "The 



166 IN a\-AIBRIDGE BACKS 

power of His resurrection,'" we feel it in St. Peter's 
sermon on the Day of Pentecost, in the thanks- 
giving of the Apostles that they were "counted 
worthy to suffer shame for His name" : in St. 
Paul's triumphant cry "Nay, in aU things we are 
more than conquerors through him that hath loved 
us." ''"Why stand we in jeopardy every hour.-*' 
Why indeed, except that having known the 
*'power of His resurrection," they were able and 
wining to share in the fellowship of His suffering? 
And yet we cannot beHeve I With Thomas we say, 
"Except I shall see in His hands the print of the 
nails, and put my finger into the print of the 
nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I wiU not 
believe." 

The truth is that no amount of historical evi- 
dence would at all times, and in aJI moods fully 
satisfy us. For no one will quite believe any- 
one's else experience in the matter; there would 
have to be a personal appearance of our dead to 
each one of us. And thus the object of death, 
whatever it is, would be defeated : in the constant 
intercourse of the living and the dead there would 
be no boundary between life and death. "It is 
expedient for you," said Jesus, "that I go away." 
So it is expedient for us that our loved ones go 
away, perhaps partly in order "that the trial of 
our faith, being much more precious than of gold 
that perisheth, might be foimd unto praise and 
honor and glory." And yet He went away from 
us in order that He might really be nearer to us. 



IMMORTALITY 167 

serve us better than He could in the flesh. Per- 
haps our beloved dead have gone from us for the 
same reason. He is everywhere and always with 
us, even unto the end of the world ; they are where 
He is, are not they too everywhere and always 
with us? He has gone from us in order that He 
may help us, and He has given us the blessed as- 
surance that as we live our lives bravely, we help 
Him. Do our dead help us, and can they be 
helped by us in a similar way? 



IX 

THE WRITING OF HISTORY 

When I crossed the ocean this summer, it was 
in the hope that I might find in English libraries 
material for an historical work which I have been 
contemplating for many years. I have dreamed 
of doing a truly beautiful piece of work, small 
perhaps but as nearly perfect of its kind as pos- 
sible, true, psychological and artistic. My illness 
has made it impossible to make any attempt to 
carry out my plan at least for some time, and in- 
deed to hope that I shall ever be able to do so 
seems like hoping against hope. Let me comfort 
myself as I sit in Trinity College Back with try- 
ing to put into words my ideal of the history 
which I would write if I could. 

Before I can do this I must ask and answer the 
question, What is the function of history, the end 
which the historian is seeking to accomplish.'^ 
Carlyle once said, "A nation's true Bible is its 
own history." And it is certainly noteworthy 
that the Hebrew Bible contains not only revela- 
tions of spiritual truth for all mankind, but that 
so much of it is occupied with the history of a 
particular race. No Jewish youth had a proper 
religious training who did not know the record of 
168 



THE WRITING OF HISTORY 169 

God's dealings with his race in the Past, who was 
not able intelligently to "praise famous men, and 
his fathers that begat him," who could not "look 
back to the rock whence he was hewn, and the hole 
of the pit whence he was digged." Was not this 
because right living in the Present must in part 
at least be inspired and directed by the Past? 
And is not this as true in London and Washington 
now as it was in Jerusalem then? For if we are 
Christians we believe that God directs English 
and American history now just as much as he di- 
rected Jewish history then, that He who has be- 
come the world's Redeemer is still a national Re- 
deemer, and therefore each nation should know 
the way in which it has been led in the past, in 
order that it may not only know itself better, but 
may also come to a fuller knowledge of Him. 

And whether we are Christians or not we can- 
not help feeling that the great spirits of the Past 
must inspire and direct us in the tasks of the 
Present, that if we would be worthy successors of 
those who have gone before, we must profit by 
their failures and successes, must begin to build 
where they left off. Our fathers have labored, and 
we have entered into their labors ; we are the baby 
on the giant's shoulders ; if we would be taller 
than the giant we must admire and love him in 
order that he may inspire us to grow. We must 
also know just how tall he was in order that we 
may know where to begin to grow. My old Ox- 
ford Professor, Dr. York Powell, in talking to 



170 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

English boys once said, "I am one of those who 
think that if we are going to keep this country 
great, we should have some times to think about 
her great men. Chinese Gordon used to say that 
the right book for young officers to read was 
Plutarch's Lives, and I am sure that the right 
books for young Englishmen and Englishwomen 
to read are books which tell them about the great 
Englishmen and Englishwomen of the Past, to 
look back and see how such men as Alfred managed 
by courage, by perseverance, by never knowing 
when they were beaten, and by sticking to what 
they knew to be right to pull the country 
through." 

I well remember the first service which I ever 
attended in Westminister Abbey. I had made a 
mistake about the hour, was late and had to stand. 
I stood right by the place where someone has 
said that more illustrious dust lies buried than 
anywhere else in England, under the out-stretched 
arm of Chatham, above the spot where he and his 
great son are at rest. I do not remember the 
subject of the sermon, but in the course of it the 
preacher said something like this, "We are here 
surrounded by England's illustrious dead, and 
they are crying out to us to know why we have 
not done more than we have, why we have not 
advanced further beyond what they did." To an 
American, visiting the Abbey for the first time, 
feeling so strongly the truth of the words "The 
Abbey makes us We,'^ this was most impressive. 



THE WRITING OF HISTORY 171 

And truly what is patriotism but such a loyalty 
to the Past as begets a promise of the Future? 
What is our country's good name for which we 
would fight, but the memory of the lives of her 
great men, the lives which "remind us that we can 
make our lives sublime"? It has been well said 
that one would no more despair of one who loved 
the history of his country than of one who loved 
his parents. 

But while it is perfectly clear that the history 
of our past should inspire us, it may not be quite 
so clear that it should direct us. We are not 
called upon to do just as our fathers did, and to 
attempt to do so would be mere childishness, for 
exactly the same thing never happens twice in 
history, and if it did it would be under different 
circumstances, and among a different people. But 
it is also true that exactly the same thing never 
happens twice in the life of an individual, never- 
theless it would be absurd to say that the indi- 
vidual does not profit by experience, and so it is 
absurd to say that the nation does not profit by 
experience. We differ from the savage as the man 
differs from the child, because we have a Past 
upon which we build, and by which we not only 
may, but must be guided. 

For we work to advantage only as we throw our- 
selves into the stream of previous human effort ; we 
make progress as we advance with that stream, 
are checked as we oppose it ; we are able to trans- 
form and develop our civilization only as we under- 



172 IN CAIMBRIDGE BACKS 

stand it. Efforts at reform which involve a vio- 
lent break with the Past are generally in vain. 
For the Past has made us, therefore so long as we 
live we cannot bury it ; we may think that we have 
done so, but sooner or later it comes to life again 
and mocks us. Even in those rare cases in which 
we are partially successful in our efforts to do 
away with it, as the French revolutionists seem 
to have been, it is at too great a cost. 

And in these days success in the present and the 
future depends upon a proper understanding of 
the past, not only on the part of the statesman, 
but on the part of each individual. For it is pub- 
lic opinion that rules to-day, and public opinion 
is the opinion of the average man. The states- 
man generally has very little to do with forming 
this public opinion ; he is more often formed by it, 
and having been formed by it, he is able by means 
of his executive ability to embody it in action. 
He is, the wise and witty Mr. Bagehot tells us "a 
man of common opinions, and uncommon abili- 
ties" ; the man who does what the average man 
wants in such a way as to make him think, "I could 
not have done it any better if I had done it my- 
self!" How important then that the common 
opinion of the average man should be wise and 
safe! 

Then if we know the truth, the truth will set us 
free, free from prejudice, not only in national but 
in international affairs. For nations are wise or 
foolish in their dealings with each other largely 



THE WRITING OF HISTORY 173 

as their understanding of history is true or false. 
This is a point which Dr. Powell used to insist 
upon. "Bulgarians would not be blowing up 
Greeks with dynamite," he said in 1903, "or 
Greeks joining Tiirks to cut the throats of Bul- 
garians, and keep Servians out of Macedonia to- 
day, but for history, written history. My old 
friend Morse Stevens used to say that Portugal 
was raised from the dead by Hercolano, a mere 
historian. It is history, written history that has 
raised the Baltic nations, that has made Rou- 
mania and Hungary important European factors, 
that has set Bohemia on her feet again, and is 
making a nation of Albania, that is keeping Polish 
patriotism alive, that has given the national spirit 
that Russia, the pretended champion of Christen- 
dom, in spite of the most solemn engagements, is 
doing her vilest to crush. It is history that is 
largely responsible for the unity of Germany, and 
for the very making of the Italian nation." 

I confess that my own desire to know and to 
write history has sprung chiefly from an intense 
interest in human life. I want to understand 
people, to understand the people of my own age, 
and the people of past ages. I never feel that 
any time has been wasted which helps me to un- 
derstand people better, for I have accomplished 
something in that my sympathies have been en- 
larged, in that I have come more and more to 
see life as something tremendous and full of in- 
terest, and men even in their follies and weak- 



174 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

nesses as worth while. Nor is this without prac- 
tical value. For we must strive to promote not 
only right living between nations, but right living 
with each other, hence the value of the psycho- 
logical side of history, that we should know the 
different types of men, understand the motives 
of their actions, and thus be fair in our judg- 
ments. Our relations to the people about us 
may make us unjust to them at times, we are too 
near them to really see them, or understand them. 
In studying the characters of the past we do not 
labor under this disadvantage, and an unpreju- 
diced judgment of the mien of the past may help 
us to get rid of our prejudices in judging the 
men of the present. 

The great historian of the seventeenth century 
who probably devoted more time to trying to 
understand Oliver Cromwell than anyone else 
has ever devoted to trying to understand any 
man, tells us that he finds in him an epitome 
of the character and history of the whole English 
people; that just as England has given material 
both to those who wish to consider her a hypo- 
critical, land-grabbing bully, and to those who 
wish to consider her the gi-eatest agent of civili- 
zation that the world has ever known, so Cromwell 
has given material alike to those who wish to 
consider him the greatest of hypocrites, and to 
those who wish to consider him the greatest of 
saints. I myself understand Cromwell's life as 
Dr. Gardiner, both by his books and by the lee- 



THE WRITING OF HISTORY 175 

tures which I heard him give at Oxford, has 
helped me to understand him, as one of the 
greatest tragedies that the world has evep 
known, and I look for a tragedian to arise who 
will see that there is as much material for tragedy 
in Cromwell as in Hamlet. For if tragedy be as 
the Greeks defined it, a conflict of ideals in a noble 
soul resulting in the apparent defeat of one or 
all of them, then the life of the man in whose 
soul the ideals of Puritanism and Parliamen- 
tarism were constantly at war, so that he was 
forced sometimes to sin against his conscience in 
sacrificing one, sometimes in sacrificing the other, 
was as great a tragedy as that of any man who 
ever walked this earth. And I confess that my 
interest in him does not arise so much from the 
fact that I see in him England writ little, 
although I do see this in him, as from the fact 
that I see in him every one of us writ large. His 
struggles are our struggles, his victories and de- 
feats are our victories and defeats, only they are 
on a large scale in order that we may see and un- 
derstand therm. 

Of course the main object of history can hardly 
be to see the workings of the human heart, for 
that is far better done in the so-called fictitious 
creations of the great masters of literature. As 
a child when a story was read to me, I was 
wont to inquire, "Is it true.'"' and great was my 
disappointment when I was answered in the 
negative. As I have grown older, I have learned 



176 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

that there is a sense in which we can be surer of 
the truth of a great novel than we can be of the 
truth of a great history. For the character 
drawn by the truly great novelist is always true; 
he has lived not once but many times, only he 
did not have the name which the novelist gives 
him. But while I am sure that my idea of Crom- 
well is true to life, that there have been and are 
men who in Cromwell's position, would have been 
actuated by the motives which I attribute to 
Cromwell, I cannot be perfectly sure that the 
inner workings of the mind of the particular man, 
Oliver Cromwell, were as I would depict them. 
Generally the historian explains his characters 
by himself, what would have been his motives, 
what his train of thought, what his inward strug- 
gles, had he been in such a position. Every man 
has something in him of every other man ; the 
historian tries to find the something in him which 
corresponds to the man of whom he is writing, the 
part of him which is the man of whom he writes, 
and there is always danger that he will find the 
wrong part. Indeed the part which he seeks may 
have been all but trained out of him or his an- 
cestors, so that now it is almost if not quite im- 
possible to find it. Therefore he cannot under- 
stand some of the characters of his history as he 
cannot understand some of his contemporaries, 
because their reasons were so entirely different 
from the reasons which would influence him. Yet 
the fact that we make mistakes as to the char- 



THE WRITING OF HISTORY 177 

acters of those about us is no reason for ceasing 
to try to understand them, and I do believe that 
by industrious study, and by loving musing upon 
those who have gone before, we can know them at 
least as clearly as we can know most of the men 
that we see, and after all the child's desire that 
the story that he reads should be true as he un- 
derstands truth has something in it. Cromwell is 
more of an influence in my life than is Hamlet. 

I once asked a class in English history whether 
in the civil wars of the seventeenth century they 
were on the side of king or Parliament ; they were 
almost evenly divided, but each could see and 
even sympathize with the arguments on the other 
side. If that had not been true, I should have 
been in despair of my teaching, for knowledge 
involves sympathy, and sympathy involves 
justice. 

Does seeing the good on both sides tend to make 
us lukewarm in actual life.? Then the teaching 
must go a step further. Each side helps. The 
liberals help when they propose reform measures, 
but the conservatives also help when they force 
them to consider them carefully before passing 
them, and thus do not allow too violent a break 
with the Past ; it is our part to help as our side 
is helping. In that wonderful collection of 
Roumanian folk songs which Carmen Sylva has 
given us in "The Bard of the Dimbo-Vitza," there 
is a song bemoaning the fate of the soldier who 
died too soon to know which way the fight had 



178 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

gone, but history seems to teach that every 
soldier, whichever side he may be on, may die 
confident that what is good in his side will con- 
quer. For in the long run neither side prevails. 
It is the good in both that is victorious. Straf- 
ford died as honorably and nobly as did Hamp- 
den, the one for order and the other for freedom. 
England now recognizes the value of both. 

Finally I am one of those who think that it is 
not unworthy to write history in order to furnish 
pleasure. We enjoy the Old World largely be- 
cause of its associations, and whatever deepens 
our enjoyment adds to our growth. 

To sum up then. History is written that we 
may find in it inspiration and direction, and that 
a fuller knowledge of human life may make us 
happier, more just and more generous. How 
then should it be written.? Evidently the first 
essential is that it should be true. Truth, it has 
been well said, is the historian's food. For him 
there is but one goal, one test, one point of honor, 
"the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 
truth." No amount of art can compensate for 
lack of truth, for while truth without art may 
fail to do good because it reaches so few people, 
art without truth does harm. And to be true 
both in letter and in spirit, it is necessary to go 
to the fountain-head: the past must be studied in 
books, in manuscripts, in monuments, in buildings, 
in pictures, in coins, in every way in which it 
makes itself known. The historian must deem no 



THE WRITING OF HISTORY 179 

time and no trouble too great to put on the 
ascertaining of even seemingly small facts, but 
he must discriminate carefully between small facts 
which are important because of their bearing 
upon a great whole, and small facts which have 
no such bearing. And he must have an open 
enough mind to give up his own pet theories when 
a fuller knowledge of the facts contradicts them. 
If he is conscious of a bias in a certain direction 
it may be well that he read the opposite side 
first and exhaustively. And when he is sure that 
his facts are true, he must not be afraid of them. 
There have been historians who have thought it 
necessary to bolster up the truth with lies ; to do 
this is to show a lack of faith in truth. 

The question comes up as to whether the his- 
torian should write with an ethical purpose, with 
the deliberate intention of influencing mankind. 
Tacitus answers in the affirmative. "This," he 
says, "I regard as history's highest function, to 
let no worthy action be uncommunicated, and to 
hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror 
to evil deeds," and in practice he is true to his 
theory. But while I believe that history if truly 
written, will perform that function, generally 
speaking I think it better that the historian, like 
the artist, should not try to teach, and should 
think as little of his influence as possible. His- 
tory may furnish material for Ethics, but it is 
not a branch of Ethics. Let the historian con- 
cern himself only with relating what is true, the 



180 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

reader may be trusted to find out the moral for 
himself. I remember how as a child I hated those 
collections of Bible stories, in which the author 
insisted upon drawing the moral; they seemed 
an insult to my intelligence. Moreover the his- 
torian who is trying to teach an ethical lesson, 
who has a case to make out either for or against 
a man or a course of action, is likely to stray from 
the truth of history. So too the historian who 
has a philosophical theory to support is likely to 
graduate from science into philosophy too easily. 
I am inclined to think that just as George Eliot 
said that she loved every character that she had 
created except Rosamond Vincy, so the historian 
instead of judging should love all, or almost all, 
of his characters. 

But in order that history should inspire and 
direct us, make us just and make us generous, 
it is necessary not only that it should be true, but 
also that its truth should be read, and read by 
the many. Hence it must be interesting. The his- 
torian must be an artist as well as a scholar. If 
the mere researcher has his value, it is chiefly 
because he furnishes material which can be used 
by the artist. When Charles James Fox was 
asked how he prepared his great orations, he re- 
plied, "I listen to the speeches of a very dull but 
well informed man, and next day I speak them 
over again for him." It is sometimes claimed 
that certain historians are not read because of 
the amount of learning which they have put into 



THE WRITING OF HISTORY 181 

their books. I am inclined to think that if a 
historian is not read, it is generally not because of 
the amount of his learning, but because of the lack 
of his art. He has put too much work into his 
book not to put more; where scholarship abounds, 
art should much more abound. It is reported 
that Carlyle once said to Meredith, "Man, ye suld 
write heestory ! ye have an heestorian in ye !" 
And every historian, even to be true, should have 
something of the novelist and poet in him ; his 
imagination should be as strong and true as 
theirs, for what is imagination but the power to 
see life, the power to put one's self in another's 
place.'' I sometimes think that no better history 
has been written than Palgrave's "Visions of 
England," for his visions are true, and he has 
been able to make us see and feel them. 

I know that it is often claimed that it is 
dangerous to attempt to write history artistically, 
for the artistic historian cannot resist the temp- 
tation to sacrifice truth to art. Macaulay is 
held up as a dreadful warning; his ambition to 
write a history that should take the place of the 
latest novel on every young lady's dressing table 
is quoted with reprehension, but after all the am- 
bition was not in itself an unworthy one. And 
it is also to be noticed that where Macaulay fails, 
it is not as a scholar or at least not as a re- 
searcher ; no one was ever more painstaking than 
he in the search for facts both important and un- 
important ; he fails as a man and he fails as an 



182 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

artist. He falls as a man because he could not 
free himself from his prejudices, or rather because 
as Mr. Chesterton would say, "his prejudices 
became postjudices." Before he knew much 
about the Duke of Marlborough he formed a cer- 
tain estimate of him ; when he knew more about 
the Duke of Marlborough than anyone else did, 
including some facts that were inconsistent with 
his estimate, he did not change the estimate. He 
fails as an artist because he has so little sense of 
proportion ; to him one fact is as important as an- 
other, if only he can make a good story out of it. 
So while almost every story that he tells, con- 
sidered by itself, has artistic merit, his great 
work as a whole is lacking artistically. It is 
just this lack of art, this lack of proportion, that 
makes it in some sense untrue; in giving us more 
truths, he has given us less truth. For so far 
from Art militating against Truth, it is art and 
only art that is true. Facts are not truth, they 
are material for truth, it is the artist and the 
artist only who can so put them together as to 
give us truth. 

Yet there is a danger in saying, "I will write 
a history for the sake of interesting people," 
just as there is a danger in saying, "I will paint 
a picture or sing a song for the sake of moving 
people." For no true artist seeks to interest 
or move others ; his only care is to present truly 
that which interests or moves him. The painter 
or singer who, having mastered his technique, is 



THE WRITING OF HISTORY 183 

so moved by the beauty of the subject that he 
would paint, or of the song that he would sing 
that he must paint or sing, does not try to move 
others, but he does move them. So the historian 
who, having collected his facts, is so interested 
in them that he must find worthy expression for 
them, does not try to interest others, but he 
does interest them. To be an historian one should 
care immensely for history, just as to be an 
artist one should care immensely for art. 

For just as technique does not make an artist, 
so accuracy does not make an historian ; there can 
be no real art which is not an expression of the 
artist's soul, so there can be no real history which 
is not an expression of the historian's soul. 
Therefore it is essential that the historian should 
have a soul, and a soul that is worth expressing. 
If much of the history that we read is dull, it is 
generally because it was written by men too dull 
to take the ordinary interest in life. No man 
can be a great historian who is only a historian, 
for the real historian must be a student of life as 
well as of books. If a man understand not his 
brother whom he hath seen, how shall he under- 
stand his great-grandfather whom he hath not 
seen.'' In proportion as a man is a specialist of 
any kind, he must take care not to allow his in- 
terests to become contracted. Mere scholar- 
ship is the mortal enemy of real scholarship, for 
what kills the man kills the scholar. It is the 
sympathetic rather than the critical mind that is 



184 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

profound and clear-sighted. Stubbs used to say 
that he came to understand institutional history 
as he served on committees, and Green said that 
it was his pastoral work in East London that 
helped him more than anything else to realize and 
depict the life of the English people. 

The three most popular English historians are 
Gibbon, Macaulay and Green, and in my opinion 
they are most popular because they are the 
three who have been most successful in putting 
themselves into their work. We know them as 
we read their books, not only their excellences, 
but also their deficiencies. In "The Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire" we see its author, 
pompous, industrious, accurate, brilliant, with a 
quick eye for the outside of things, but with 
neither the mind nor the heart to see beneath the 
surface, to comprehend the panting of the thirsty 
soul for that which satisfies, the longing of the 
tortured spirit for that which rests. Therefore 
he failed to understand the real essence of the 
period of which he wrote. Therefore he even 
mistook his subject and called his work "The De- 
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire," when he 
was really writing the story of the rise of the new 
nations. 

In Macaulay's great history too we see Ma- 
caulay's self in all his weakness and all his 
strength. We become acquainted not only with 
the good and brilliant Whig, the man who never 
changed his mind, whose friends wished that they 



THE WRITING OF HISTORY 185 

could be as sure of anything as Tom Macaulay 
was of everything, but also with the good and bril- 
liant comrade, the diner-out who always furnished 
intellectual entertainment, clever but never so 
subtle as to make it difficult for average intel- 
lects to follow him, and seem' to share in his 
cleverness ; a generous nature, but after all some- 
what commonplace and on the surface. And 
why? Was it not because although Macaulay 
was affectionate, he was not passionate? his love 
for his family was beautiful, but outside the 
family he would seem to have had no strong 
affections ; there is no evidence that he ever fell 
in love or even had a very warm friendship ; in- 
deed he tells us that he preferred the friendship of 
dead authors to that of living men. And the 
deepest things of life are not to be learned by 
mere loving; to know them we must not only 
love, we must fall in love, and this Macaulay never 
did. 

Then take Green, if not the most popular, at 
least the dearest of English historians. Where 
Gibbon and Macaulay are weak. Green is strong. 
No man ever gave us the color, the atmosphere 
of a period, the spiritual life of a people as he 
has given it. But try to use his Short History 
as a text-book for a class unfamiliar with the 
subject; then you will begin to realize that the 
outer has been sacrificed to the inner, the class 
get the atmosphere, but do not get the events. Is 
not this what might be expected of the man who 



186 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 

tells us that because of the peculiar inwardness 
of his nature, he could scarcely remember any- 
thing that happened in his own life before he was 
fifteen years old? 

Gifts differ, and each must work according to 
the nature of the gift that is in him, but when 
the truly great historian comes he will have all 
the gifts : he will be scientist, philosopher and 
artist in one, and his gifts will be so co-ordinated 
that every chapter that he writes will be part of 
the Truth of God, a revelation of the thought of 
the Creator realized in His creatures. That is 
the historian's aim, and surely each may take 
pride, if not in his own work, at least in that in 
which he believes, and toward which he would like 
to minister. 



OCT 30 y^W 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



OCT ^.;) i^ii 



